A new digital signal processing technique for applications in nuclear spectroscopy

A multichannel pulse-height-analysis system based on digital signal processing techniques was developed and tested for nuclear spectroscopy. The system digitizes gaussian-shaped pulses with widths greater than 2 /spl mu/s. Input pulses are completely processed in real time on a single PC-AT bus board that replaces the standard analog pulse-height analyzer boards. Using a modified sliding-scale method, differential nonlinearity has been reduced to 1 to 2% for 4096 channels. A 30% increase in pulse throughput rate at 1 kHz has been achieved by reducing overall system dead time. Other potential advantages will be explored in future work.