Smart radiation monitors prototype development with standardized boards

Full text: Radiation monitoring instrumentation employs analogue/digital electronics for processing detector signals and converting it into radiation units. System-On-Chip (SOC) solutions are becoming increasingly popular in the widely used gamma/neutron monitors. As a first step towards providing SOC solutions to the wide variety of health physics instrumentation, it is necessary to develop generic prototype boards for analogue processing of detector signals, its conversion into digital form and further into radiation units and transmitting it over the computer communication network. In the present work generic micro-controller board and generic Ethernet board dedicated use in radiation monitoring instrumentation with networking capabilities are described. These boards will find application in a variety of other field-bus based instrumentation in the laboratory/industrial environment with the available standard embedded software packages. This paper gives details of the hardware specifications for both of these boards and its performance in radiation monitor application