Development of a Signal Processing Software for Scintillation Detectors and Implementation on an FPGA for Fast Sensing

Abstract

An open-source code RadSigPro 1.0 has been developed and used for fast processing of nanosecond-long pulses from scintillation detectors. This processing includes pulse height distribution (PHD), pulse shape discrimination (PSD), and time of flight (TOF). The code has been implemented onto the programmable logic design of a field programmable gate array (FPGA) design for on-the-fly processing of neutron and gamma-ray pulses. A weighted average of the percent difference of the results for RadSigPro 1.0 implemented on a CPU and a FPGA logic design is calculated. This shows a 0% difference for the PHD data sets, a 0.458% and 0.344% difference for the designated gamma detector and neutron detector PSD data sets, respectively, and a 0% difference for the TOF data set. When the FPGA logic design is applied and simulated, it computed the total and tail pulse areas within 5 ns of the arrival of the final data point used for accumulation and also captured the pulse height value within 2 ns of the arrival of the pulse’s maximum data point.

Keywords:

• Scintillation detectors
• field programmable gate array
• fast detection
• pulse shape discrimination
• time of flight

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the support provided by Texas A&M collaborative research with the Los Alamos National Laboratory, National Laboratories Office, Faculty Development Fellowship.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

^a The RadSigPro code can be accessed at https://github.com/NeutronNeutrinoSensing/RadSigPro.

^b The FPGA implementation can be accessed at: https://github.com/NeutronNeutrinoSensing/FPGA.