Data acquisition ATCA system for neutron and gamma-rays spectrometries

Digital pulse processing (DPP) systems are known to have better performance than analog ones for neutron and/or gamma-ray pulses. DPP can synthesize almost any pulse response shape without the associated signal degradation which happens in a complex analog path. Measuring techniques involving detectors/spectrometers for fusion diagnostics rely on real-time algorithms, implemented in field programmable gate array (FPGA), for pulse height analysis, pulse shape discrimination, and pileup rejection of digitized pulses in real time for reduced data throughput, monitoring, and control. This article describes a data acquisition system for real-time pulse analysis based on ATCA and contains a 6 GFLPOS ix86-based control unit and a number of transient recorder (TR) modules interconnected through PCI Express links. Each TR module features (i) eight channels of 12 bit resolution with accuracy equal or higher than 10 bits, (ii) 200 Msamples/s of sampling rate achieving 400 Msamples/s in an interleaved architecture, (iii) 2 or 4 Gbytes of local memory, and (iv) two field FPGAs able to perform real-time processing algorithms