OpenPET: A flexible electronics system for radiotracer imaging

We present the design for OpenPET, an electronics readout system designed for prototype radiotracer imaging instruments. The critical requirements are that it have sufficient performance, channel count, channel density, and power consumption to service a complete camera, and yet be simple, flexible, and customizable enough to be used with almost any detector or camera design. A unique feature of this system is that each analog input is processed independently. Each input can be configured to accept signals of either polarity as well as either differential or ground referenced signals. Each signal is digitized by a continuously sampled ADC, which is processed by an FPGA to extract pulse height information. A leading edge discriminator creates a timing edge that is ¿time stamped¿ by a TDC implemented inside the FPGA. This digital information from each channel is sent to an FPGA that services 16 analog channels, and information from multiple channels is processed by this FPGA to perform logic for crystal lookup, DOI calculation, calibration, etc. As this processing is software controlled, it can be modified / customized easily. The system is be open source, meaning that all technical data (specifications, schematics and board layout files, source code, and instructions) will be publicly available.