Precise Coincidence Detection on FPGAs: Three Case Studies (Abstract Only)

In high-performance applications, such as quantum physics and positron emission tomography, precise coincidence detection is of central importance: The quality of the reconstructed images depends on the accuracy with which the underlying system detects the coincidence of two events. This paper explores the utility of three different hardware modules for this very task. In contrast to most of the state-of-the-art systems, these modules are edge triggered rather than being voltage-level based. This change in the modus operandi increases the accuracy of the resulting coincidence window by about one order of magnitude. In addition, this paper considers the entire detector arrays, which host a large number of selected detectors. Due to additional signal propagation delays, these arrays yield a coincidence window width as short as 70 ps within an effective range of up to 10 ns.