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PIXIE-4 User’s Manual
V2.69
©
XIA
2015. All rights reserved.
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(see section 5.2), and only have to be read out by the DSP when an event occurs.
Reconstructing the energy and incrementing the spectrum is done by the DSP, so that the RTPU
is ready to take new data immediately after the readout. This usually takes much less than one
filter rise time, so that no system deadtime is produced by a “capture and store” operation. This
is a significant source of the enhanced throughput found in digital systems.
Figure 6.5: Peak detection and sampling in the Pixie-4.
The peak detection and sampling in the Pixie-4 is handled as indicated in Figure 6.5. Two
trapezoidal filters are implemented, a
fast filter
and a
slow filter
. The fast filter is used to detect
the arrival of
-rays, the slow filter is used for the measurement of V
x
, with reduced noise at
longer filter rise times. The fast filter has a filter length L
f
= 0.1
s and a gap G
f
=0.1
s. The
slow filter has L
s
= 1.2
s and G
s
= 0.35
s.
The arrival of the
-ray step (in the preamplifier output) is detected by digitally comparing the
fast filter output to THRESHOLD, a digital constant set by the user. Crossing the threshold
starts a counter to count PEAKSAMP clock cycles to arrive at the appropriate time to sample
the value of the slow filter. Because the digital filtering processes are deterministic,
PEAKSAMP depends only on the values of the fast and slow filter constants and the rise time
of the preamplifier pulses. The slow filter value captured following PEAKSAMP is then the
slow digital filter’s estimate of V
x
.