A high performance peak-detect and hold circuit for pulse height analysis

Peak extractor circuits are an important link in most pulse-height analysis systems. A novel architecture with performance exceeding previous state-of-the-art designs is presented. A droop rate ranging from 125 μV/μs and a charge injection of 5 mV are reported along with a 2.2 MHz bandwidth, a 38 V/μs slew rate, and integral nonlinearity of 50 PPM. The low droop rate allows temporary storage of the signal in an analog FIFO (first-in first-out) with minimal peak broadening, suitable for high-resolution low-energy X-ray analysis. This configuration has been implemented in an analog-to-digital converter system using the peak-detect and hold circuit architecture. The complete system had a differential linearity of 1.5% at 64 K conversion gain, an integral linearity of ±0.016%, and an effective conversion time of 1.9 μs for a count rate of 210000 C/s to the input of a pulse processor producing 3-μs-wide pulses