Highly flexible PC-based data acquisition system for TOF measurements with pulsed neutron beams

Neutron spectroscopy has become the dominant scattering method at pulsed neutron sources. Therefore efforts have been made at KFA Julich to develop a flexible and inexpensive data acquisition system which fulfils the requirements of several very different time-of-flight experiments. This system is based on a standard extended industry standard architecture (EISA) personal computer. The different modes of operation are implemented by different configurations of a user-programmable application specific integrated circuit (ASIC). This ASIC is the core of an EISA interface adapter in the personal computer (PC). The interface accepts the detector pulses from the experiment, evaluates the time information, and increments the according location in the memory of a PC that acts as a multiparameter, multichannel analyzer. Experiment control, including life display and subsequent evaluation, are performed as Windows tasks.