Microchannel-plate-based electro-optical A-D conversion

摘要

A novel microchannel plate (MCP) - based electro-optical A/D converter is proposed for signal bandwidth in excess of 100 MHz. The signal forward-biases an electron flux through 50 approximately ega impedance - matched transmission lines deposited on an MCP. The back-biasing of the gap between adjacent MCPs provides a voltage threshold for the signal triggering of an electron cascade in the second MCP. The second MCP is biased by a square wave timing pulse in order to measure the time at which the signal exceeded the back-bias threshold. It is shown that reasonable MCP operating parameters result in approximately 100 psec time resolution. The Nyquist criteria is applied to determine the least bit size for voltage sampling of a transient pulse.