A digital acquisition and elaboration system for nuclear fast pulse detection

A new digital acquisition and elaboration system has been developed and assembled in ENEA-Frascati for the direct sampling of fast pulses from nuclear detectors such as scintillators and diamond detectors. The system is capable of performing the digital sampling of the pulses (200 MSamples/s, 14-bit) and the simultaneous (compressed) data transfer for further storage and software elaboration. The design (FPGA-based) is oriented to real-time applications and has been developed in order to allow acquisition with no loss of pulses and data storage for long-time intervals (tens of s at MHz pulse count rates) without the need of large on-board memory. A dedicated pulse analysis software, written in LabVIEW TM , performs the treatment of the acquired pulses, including pulse recognition, pile-up rejection, baseline removal, pulse shape particle separation and pulse height spectra analysis. The acquisition and pre-elaboration programs have been fully integrated with the analysis software.