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Short course: "Digital Pulse Processing" by Carlo Tintori (CAEN)
Nowadays, the availability of very fast and high precision ADC chips has driven physicists and engineers to realize acquisition systems in which the analog-to-digital conversion is performed as close as possible to the detector. This approach is reversed with respect to more traditional acquisition chains which were made out of mainly analog circuits with the A to D conversion at the end of the chain. The use of fast digitizers to acquire signals coming from radiation detectors opens new possibilities and make the front-end and readout electronics much more flexible and compact. The extraction of the quantities of interest, like energy, timing, etc. is now performed on the digital data stream by means of dedicated DPP algorithms (Digital Pulse Processing).
The purpose of this short course is to present the basic principle of operation of a waveform digitizer with DPP capabilities and how it can be used for physics applications. The following topics will be presented:
* Brief description of the hardware of the waveform digitizers: how the sampling rate, the number of bits, the memory depth and the readout bandwidth affect the results in the acquisition of physics events.
* Description of some DPP algorithms for physics applications: advanced triggering and noise rejection; zero suppression; trapezoidal filters for the peak height analysis (digital MCA); digital charge integration (readout of SiPM and PMT); digital CFD and timing measurements; pulse shape discrimination.
* Comparison between the traditional analog acquisition chains and the full digital approach. Presentation of some results obtained with gamma spectroscopy in germanium and silicon detectors, single photon counting with Silicon Photo-multipliers, spectroscopy with scintillators read out by PMTs and other applications.
* Practical demonstration with a signal emulator and/or with a real detector.
Speaker
Carlo Tintori is senior staff member of CAEN S.p.A., where he has been working in the Front End Electronics Division for 15 years designing analog and digital boards (mainly VME and NIM) as well as ASICs for physics and medical applications. He was involved in the development of acquisition and readout systems for several experiments and projects like Icarus, Atlas (Muon Trigger), Alice (TOF), AMS2 (Tracker and TRD), Euritrack.
RT2010 presentations available online