Design of handheld 500-MHz digital multi-channel analyzer on single board

Background: Rising time discrimination of current pulse signal by using Cs2LiYC16:CE(CLYC), boron plastic scintillator and other neutron gamma detector, analog multi-channel and common digital multi-channel analyzer can not meet the requirements. Purpose: This study aims to develop a high-speed digital multi-channel analyzer. Methods: In this paper, by using the direct coupling way, a special high-speed analog front end circuit is designed. The high-speed analog-to-digital converter (ADC) is connected with field-programmable gate array (FPGA) could realize digital design well, then the system will finish data filtering, pulse amplitude extraction, baseline restorer, spectrum storage, transmission function and so on in the FPGA chip. The universal serial bus (USB) peripheral hangs on the embedded PowerPC kernel, the system can not only simplify the complex timing function of the external controller, but also realize high-speed data transmission with personal computer software. In this work, low noise and high current switching power supply is also designed, finally implemented a hand-held offline independent operation of the high speed digital multi-channel single plate. Results: After the experimental tests, we can see that the digital multi-channel analog front end circuit designed in this paper used in NaI(Tl), boron plastic scintillator, LaBr₃(Ce) and other scintillation detector can reach to 110 MHz of large signal bandwidth and climb to 200 MHz of small signal bandwidth. Furthermore, it also has real-time sampling rate of 500 MHz, pulse counting rate by more than 10⁷ s^-1, and the linearity is up to 0.9998. Conclusion: The ultimate measured scintillation spectrum in this paper can satisfy the actual requirement.