A 2-DIMENSIONAL MULTIDETECTOR MULTICHANNEL SCALER FOR DOUBLE-MODULATION TIME-OF-FLIGHT DATA-ACQUISITION

A novel two-dimensional multichannel scaler is described, providing an inexpensive method for recording double modulated time-of-flight spec tra generated by a 16-element multi-detector array. The design uses a hardware first stage implemented with programmable logic and a softwar e second stage, running on a digital signal processing board.. The har dware stage can count at a peak event rate of 20 MHz with a time resol ution (minimum bin width) of 50 ns. The maximum sustained event rate i s determined by the speed of the software processing. The flexibility of the design makes it suitable for a wide range of applications in wh ich counts are recorded as a function of two variables.