A Windows CE stand-alone digital spectrometer

A stand-alone digital spectrometer based on a multiprocessor DSP system that runs the Windows CE real time operating system is presented. The system is built around the PC104 industrial PC bus and contains 3 stackable modules: CPU, ethernet controller, and a dedicated multi-DSP pulse processing board. The CPU module can be any commercially available one provided it is able to run the user friendly Windows CE operating system. The ethernet module allows for an easy remote configuration and data exchanging over the TCP/IP network protocol. The multi-DSP pulse processing board has been designed in accordance with a previously presented architecture that contains a master floating point Digital Signal Processor (DSP), a scalable number of slave DSPs and, special purpose trigger, pulse locator and data routing digital circuits. This architecture as well as the data acquisition block has been optimized to accommodate high throughput pulse rates in Nuclear Spectroscopy applications. However, its generality allows for many other signal processing, control and communication applications to be easily implemented using this system.