A novel digital pulse processing architecture for nuclear instrumentation

This paper introduces a specific Multiple Program Multiple Data (MPMD) architecture designed to address the issues of nuclear instrumentation: pulse processing, real-time, multi-channel flexibility, dead-time management and programmability. The proposed architecture comprises a set of independent and programmable functional units. Their execution is driven by the pulses arrival. It is able to deal with non-deterministic events and program durations. The virtual prototype of the architecture is developed in cycle-accurate SystemC and shows promising results in terms of scalability while maintaining zero dead-time. This architecture paves the way for novel programmable embedded real-time pulse processing restricted until now to offline processing.