Nuclear spectroscopy pulse height analysis based on digital signal processing techniques

Journal Article · Tue Aug 01 04:00:00 EDT 1995 · IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/23.467890· OSTI ID:136889

Simoes, J B; Simoes, P C.P.S.; Correia, C M.B.A. ^[1]

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1. Univ. of Coimbra (Portugal). Physics Dept.

A digital approach to pulse height analysis is presented. It consists of entire pulse digitization, using a flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC), being its height estimated by a floating point digital signal processor (DSP) as one parameter of a model best fitting to the pulse samples. The differential nonlinearity (DNL) is reduced by simultaneously adding to the pulse, prior to its digitization, two analog signals provided by a digital-to-analog converter (DAC). One of them is a small amplitude dither signal used to eliminate a bias introduced by the fitting algorithm. The other, with large amplitude, corrects the ADC nonlinearities by a method similar to the well known Gatti`s sliding scale. The simulations carried out showed that, using a 12-bit flash ADC, a 14-bit DAC and a dedicated floating point DSP performing a polynomial fitting to the samples around the pulse peak, it is actually possible to process about 10,000 events per second, with a constant height pulse dispersion of only 4 on 8,192 channels and a very good differential linearity. A prototype system based on the Texas Instruments floating point DSP TMS320C31 and built following the presented methodology has already been tested and performed as expected.

• OSTI ID: 136889
• Report Number(s): CONF-941061--
• Journal Information: IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science, Journal Name: IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science Journal Issue: 4Pt1 Vol. 42; ISSN 0018-9499; ISSN IETNAE
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

44 INSTRUMENTATION
INCLUDING NUCLEAR AND PARTICLE DETECTORS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
DATA PROCESSING
DESIGN
DIGITAL SYSTEMS
PERFORMANCE
PULSE ANALYZERS
SPECTROMETERS
THEORETICAL DATA