Current trends in developing digital signal processing electronics for semiconductor detectors

摘要

A major recent trend in semiconductor (SC) detectors has been to combine very good energy resolution with high counting rates or position sensitivity, which results in arrays of many detectors, detectors with many electrodes, or both. This produces a requirement for large numbers of high performance but relatively inexpensive processing channels. Digital processing electronics are particularly effective in these circumstances because of their high performance, flexibility, and ease of interfacing to a computer control system. Driven by consumer demand for low power, high-performance communication devices, the electronics industry has developed an increasingly powerful set of digital components, including ADCs, FPGAs, and DSPs that can be applied to meet this requirement. This paper reviews these trends and also briefly examines how increased digital processing power can be applied both to extract additional information from the detectors and also to carry out in real time what were previously post-processing operations. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.