We report on the implementation of a compact multi-detector fully digital spectrometer and data acquisition system at a nuclear microprobe for ion beam analysis and imaging. The spectrometer design allows for system scalability with no restriction on the number of detectors. It consists of four-channel high-speed digitizer modules for detector signal acquisition and one low-speed digital-to-analog converter (DAC) module with two DAC channels and additional general purpose inputs/outputs to control ion beam scanning and data acquisition. Each digitizer module of the spectrometer provides its own Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) as digital signal processing unit to analyze detector signals as well as to synchronize the ion beam position in hard real-time. With the customized FPGA designs for all modules, all calculation intensive tasks are executed inside the modules, which reduces significantly the data stream to and CPU load on the control computer. To achieve an optimal energy resolution for all detector/preamplifier pulse shape characteristics, a user-definable infinite impulse response filter with high throughput for energy determination was implemented. The new spectrometer has an online data analysis feature, a compact size, and is able to process any type of detector signals such as particle induced x-ray emission, Rutherford backscattering spectrometry, or scanning transmission ion microscopy.
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August 2013
Research Article|
August 05 2013
A digitizer based compact digital spectrometer for ion beam analysis using field programmable gate arrays and various energy algorithms
Markus Jäger;
Markus Jäger
a)
1Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science,
University of Leipzig
, PF 100920, 04009 Leipzig, Germany
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Tilo Reinert
Tilo Reinert
b)
2Department of Physics,
University of North Texas
, 1155 Union Circle, Denton, Texas 76203, USA
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b)
E-mail: tilo@unt.edu
Rev. Sci. Instrum. 84, 085105 (2013)
Article history
Received:
April 08 2013
Accepted:
July 17 2013
Citation
Markus Jäger, Tilo Reinert; A digitizer based compact digital spectrometer for ion beam analysis using field programmable gate arrays and various energy algorithms. Rev. Sci. Instrum. 1 August 2013; 84 (8): 085105. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4817211
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