A new pulse-oriented digital acquisition system for nuclear detectors

During the last years extensive work has been carried out at ENEA-Frascati to develop a new digital system capable to acquire pulses (generated, for example, by γ-rays and neutrons in scintillators) at very high speed (200 Msamples/s) and with high dynamic range (14-bit). The prototype of such new concept FPGA-based digital acquisition board has been tested with neutrons and gamma sources in various nuclear fusion and accelerator facilities. In addition to the high speed/high dynamic range, a major feature of the system is the use of the novel DWDA (Dynamic Windows Data Acquisition) technique. The sampled incoming signal is acquired only in presence of a pulse exceeding a given threshold; the duration of the acquisition window is variable and such that no further pulses occurring in the window are lost. In this article the system architecture and some experimental results are presented.