Digital techniques for the derandomization and acquisition of the signals from multichannel high-rate spectrometers

An optimized mixed analogue-digital derandomizer-analyzer for multichannel spectrometers has been designed and realized. It captures the pulse height of the events, which may occur even simultaneously among the 16 available input channels and randomly on the time axis of each individual channel. The pulse heights, stored on hold capacitors, are then passed along sequentially to a common 12-bit flash ADC by means of a digital circuitry which optimizes the addressing distribution among the channels and the conversion efficiency of the ADC. A sliding-scale system is implemented to ameliorate the differential linearity so as to meet the requirements of the spectroscopic applications. The architecture, working principles, and a first characterization of the developed module are presented