Nuclear pulse generator embedded in FPGA.

This manuscript presents the design and implementation of an intellectual property core, which acts as a generator of nuclear pulses. The design is embedded in a Field programmable gate array. It is capable of forming pulses with an exponential shape such as those from a radiation detector or Gaussian-shaped pulses such as those provided by a spectroscopy amplifier. Its characteristic is that the amplitude and period of these pulses can be configured by the user through a Virtual instrument generated in graphic language through the LabVIEW development platform. This can greatly reduce the volume, cost and energy consumption in relation to commercial analog nuclear electronics pulse generators.

FPGA embedded multichannel analyzer.

An multichannel analyzer has been designed, and its performance has been evaluated. The multichannel analyzer is embedded into a Field programmable gate array. The design incudes the virtual instrument in order to hand and to visualize the pulse height spectrum. Two commercially available multichannel analyzers using a NaI(Tl) and HPGe detectors were used to obtain the pulse height spectra of 137Cs, 60Co and 152Eu sources and were compared with the pulse height spectra obtained with the embedded multichannel analyzer, being alike the spectra obtained with the commercial multichannel analyzer. Our design is smaller, low cost and it has options to add other features.