A high-speed low-power spectrum accumulator using dual-port RAM and state machine control

A high-speed spectrum accumulator circuit intended for use with a time-of-flight mass spectrometer is described. Advantages of this design include high-speed data acquisition (>400 kHz periodic, 2.5- mu s pulse-pair resolution), high resolution (256 channels, expandible to 1024), low power ( approximately 2 W), and circuit simplicity. This performance is achieved with an optimum combination of an 8-b flash analog-to-digital converter, dual-port RAM, and erasable programmable logic device state machine controller.<
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