Portable radiation spectrometer using low power digital pulse processing

A portable radiation spectrometer was developed based on real time digital signal processing. A single chip, low power digital pulse processor incorporates the trapezoidal pulse shaper, a fast discriminator, base-line restorer, peak detector, pile-up rejector and the data acquisition circuitry. The processor operates at 25 MHz clock speed and has active power consumption of less than 600 mW. The front-end electronics provide analog signal conditioning and data conversion with power consumption of less than 600 mW. The spectrometer is powered by a single battery, exploits a USB interface and fits in a small package with dimensions 15/spl times/18/spl times/3.8 cm.