An Analog to Digital Converter Capable of Nanosecond Resolution

Circuitry has been designed and constructed which is able to analyze and reproduce accurately the slope and pulse height at various points along a rapidly changing signal which occurs only once. The signal is analyzed at 10-nanosecond intervals. This circuitry is also able to sense a zero slope per unit time and in this mode it can be used as a multichannel pulse height analyzer with a dead-time which is dependent only on the rise time of the pulses it is analyzing (pulse pair resolution of 10-7 seconds for random pulses with a 0.1-μsec rise time is possible). The model under discussion has a maximum storage capacity of 160 channels with 28 bits of information per channel.