Low-cost modular multichannel acquisition system for high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy detectors

We present a modular multichannel acquisition system for high-resolution X-ray spectroscopy detectors. The system has been developed for the acquisition of signals coming from 12-element Si drift detectors but can be easily used for the acquisition of signals coming from other kinds of detectors. The main characteristics of the system are flexibility and low-cost. The basic component of our acquisition system is a board that acquires the signal coming from a shaping amplifier and provides peak stretching, peak detection and finally the analog-to digital conversion. The converted data are transferred to the PC using the protocol of a bi-directional enhanced parallel port. The acquisition system has been fully developed and tested. The obtained overall linearity is within +/-0.4%. The achieved energy resolution is fully comparable to the one achieved with a commercial MCA system provided of a 13bit ADC. The system has been extensively used to acquire signals coming from single- and multi-element SDDs.