0000000000088333
AUTHOR
Ramón J. Aliaga
Digital pulse-shape analysis with a TRACE early silicon prototype
[EN] A highly segmented silicon-pad detector prototype has been tested to explore the performance of the digital pulse shape analysis in the discrimination of the particles reaching the silicon detector. For the first time a 200 tun thin silicon detector, grown using an ordinary floating zone technique, has been shown to exhibit a level discrimination thanks to the fine segmentation. Light-charged particles down to few MeV have been separated, including their punch-through. A coaxial HPGe detector in time coincidence has further confirmed the quality of the particle discrimination. K.; 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Conceptual design of the TRACE detector readout using a compact, dead time-less analog memory ASIC
[EN] The new TRacking Array for light Charged particle Ejectiles (TRACE) detector system requires monitorization and sampling of all pulses in a large number of channels with very strict space and power consumption restrictions for the front-end electronics and cabling. Its readout system is to be based on analog memory ASICs with 64 channels each that sample a View the MathML source window of the waveform of any valid pulses at 200 MHz while discarding any other signals and are read out at 50 MHz with external ADC digitization. For this purpose, a new, compact analog memory architecture is described that allows pulse capture with zero dead time in any channel while vastly reducing the tota…
Design of an integrated low-noise, low-power charge sensitive preamplifier for γ and particle spectroscopy with solid state detectors
The design of an integrated charge-sensitive preamplifier suitable for γ-ray spectroscopy is presented. It is fully integrated, except for the feedback resistor, and can drive directly a 50Ω cable with its low impedance output stage. It is designed in AMS 0.35µm technology and its small dimensions and low power consumption (10 mW) are optimized for multi-channel applications. It works both with germanium and silicon detectors for a large range of values of electrode and feedback capacitances. Its wide bandwidth ensures a risetime of 10 ns or less in most configurations. This characteristic makes the preamplifier suitable not only for high resolution spectroscopy but also for pulse-shape ana…
Multiprocessor SoC Implementation of Neural Network Training on FPGA
Software implementations of artificial neural networks (ANNs) and their training on a sequential processor are inefficient because they do not take advantage of parallelism. ASIC and FPGA implementations employ specific hardware structures to exploit parallelism in order to improve processing speed; however, optimizing resource usage requires the use of fixed-point arithmetic, thereby losing precision, and the final system is restricted to a particular network topology. This paper presents a mixed approach based on a multiprocessor system-on-chip (SoC) on a FPGA. The use of software-driven embedded microprocessors with custom floating-point extensions for ANN related functions allows for gr…
SoC-Based Implementation of the Backpropagation Algorithm for MLP
The backpropagation algorithm used for the training of multilayer perceptrons (MLPs) has a high degree of parallelism and is therefore well-suited for hardware implementation on an ASIC or FPGA. However, most implementations are lacking in generality of application, either by limiting the range of trainable network topologies or by resorting to fixed-point arithmetic to increase processing speed. We propose a parallel backpropagation implementation on a multiprocessor system-on-chip (SoC) with a large number of independent floating-point processing units, controlled by software running on embedded processors in order to allow flexibility in the selection of the network topology to be traine…
Maximum likelihood positioning for gamma-ray imaging detectors with depth of interaction measurement
Abstract The center of gravity algorithm leads to strong artifacts for gamma-ray imaging detectors that are based on monolithic scintillation crystals and position sensitive photo-detectors. This is a consequence of using the centroids as position estimates. The fact that charge division circuits can also be used to compute the standard deviation of the scintillation light distribution opens a way out of this drawback. We studied the feasibility of maximum likelihood estimation for computing the true gamma-ray photo-conversion position from the centroids and the standard deviation of the light distribution. The method was evaluated on a test detector that consists of the position sensitive …
Performance of the Advanced GAmma Tracking Array at GANIL
The performance of the Advanced GAmma Tracking Array (AGATA) at GANIL is discussed, on the basis of the analysis of source and in-beam data taken with up to 30 segmented crystals. Data processing is described in detail. The performance of individual detectors are shown. The efficiency of the individual detectors as well as the efficiency after $\gamma$-ray tracking are discussed. Recent developments of $\gamma$-ray tracking are also presented. The experimentally achieved peak-to-total is compared with simulations showing the impact of back-scattered $\gamma$ rays on the peak-to-total in a $\gamma$-ray tracking array. An estimate of the achieved position resolution using the Doppler broadeni…