Recent developments in detector back-end electronics for position sensitive gas proportional detectors have moved the data processing bottleneck out of the front-end electronics and into signal processing. Even with today's fastest DSP's, the centroid estimation of the cathode charge distribution can impose a limitation on the ultimate count rate attainable by the detector. Hen we present a centroid-finding algorithm that does the bulk of the centroid calculations based on a two-point Gaussian fit that assumes a priori knowledge of the distribution's variance. The variance is estimated only in the calibration phase. The two-point algorithm has the advantage that no division is required, greatly reducing the computational burden on the DSP. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated by implementation on existing detectors.
展开▼
