Microprocessor driven ultrafast multichannel event counter

In this paper we describe a multichannel counter which can be very helpful in a wide range of physical measurements: time constants of very fast relaxation phenomena (from 1 ns to 10 μs), time interval between event occurrences (from 3.5 ns to 21.5 μs), phase measurements on periodic signals, event‐time histogram construction (up to 65536 events on each channel), etc. Its larger number of channels, 6143 (3×211−1) permits covering a wide range of time constants while preserving its ultimate time resolution (3.5 ns). The sampling technique we used introduces no parasitic counting, so that it is able to record very short transient signals.