A high-speed data acquisition system for segmented Ge-Detectors

When using segmented Ge-detectors for gamma ray tracking it is necessary to determine the segment pulse shapes with high accuracy. A high-speed data acquisition system with many channels, high precision and with high sampling rate is required. There are also many other applications for such a system. Our system uses high performance FPGAs (Xilinx Virtex-V [2]) to cope with the data rates delivered by the high speed ADC chosen (Atmel 2Gsps, 10 bits) and to make all the data processing onboard in real time. Each board contains four such ADCs, which can either handle four channels up to full speed, or achieve higher sampling rates with interleaving. The boards can communicate with each other over different types of high-speed communication links. Control and monitoring is implemented with embedded processors. The processed result will be transmitted over Ethernet to final storage. The project introduces many challenging issues: signal integrity, ADC performance, interfacing ADCs to the FPGA, synchronisation of ADCs across the entire system, implementing flexible processing algorithms, high speed interconnection between boards and managing the significant heat generation. This is an ongoing project with interesting potentials for the future.