High-speed real-time ion detection system for time-of-flight mass spectrometry application

摘要

This paper presents a high-speed ion detection system for time-of-flight mass spectroscopy (TOFMS) applications. The system consists of the data acquisition, distribution, and storage section. The output signal from a microchannel plate (MCP) of a mass analyzer will be firstly digitized by a 3Gsps high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) in the acquisition section. Then the digitized data stream will be distributed into four streams and be stored into four solid-state storage cards. The read-back data can be restored for further processing. System evaluation results show that the system has wide input bandwidth, high sample rate (up to 3.0 GB/s), good signal-to-noise ratio (SNR; up to 45dB), and high data throughput (over 3 GB/s). That makes the system suitable for improving dynamic detection performance in TOFMS applications.