A Systolic Radiation Monitoring System

This paper describes a data acquisition system for radiation monitoring which significantly improves performance over conventional systems by providing higher throughput, elimination of data skew, easier and inexpensive isolation, improved system accuracy, and compact implementation. The novel systolic data acquisition system, including systolic converter, processor and networking was developed to alleviate drawbacks of various conventional data acquisition systems used in radiation monitoring. The system is based on a systolic conversion, processing and networking method amenable to highly integrated vector architecture. The method employs systolic rules which can be developed for a selected problem. The rules for the radiation monitoring problem have been developed so as to apply not only locally but also globally to the systolic network. A form of the network has been implemented and is operational in a nuclear reactor site. Other forms are being implemented and tested for other data skew sensitive problems.