Development of a single-chip digital radiation spectrometer based on ARM Cortex-M7 micro-controller unit

摘要

Digital signal processing is a flexible and effective approach for development of radiation spectroscopy systems. However, the conventional digital spectrometers are built using many hardware components resulted in a more complex and costly system. In this work, a complete digital spectrometer has been implemented in an ARM-based STM32F730 micro-controller. The proposed approach was benefited from a high signal to noise ratio of the trapezoidal filter to extract the particle energies. The recorded pulse height spectra using a large HPGe detector proved the good performance of the implemented system in the experiments. The proposed spectroscopy system provided an energy resolution better than 0.15% at 1332.5 keV along with a maximum nonlinearity of 0.34%, over a wide energy range. The overall results revealed that modern MCUs can be efficiently employed to develop a compact low-powered and cost-effective digital radiation spectrometer.