A general purpose multichannel readout system for radiation detectors

The design and performance of a multichannel readout system for radiation detectors are presented. The developed 32-channel prototype system comprises fast, low-noise, front-end followed by a 10-bit multichannel digitizer and on-board FPGA data concentrator, processing the stream of digitized data with up to 6.4 Gbps rate. The operation of the whole system is managed by a microcontroller. The system can work in self-triggering mode or can be triggered externally. The implemented trigger mechanism allows for elaborate event filtering and selection of data to be transmitted to the host through the USB interface. A wide spectrum of measurements showing and quantifying the key system parameters like data transmission rate and event rate, noise, and gain are presented to prove the correct system performance. To increase the power efficiency in experiments with a non-continuous beam structure, a power pulsing mechanism is implemented and verified experimentally.