SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR HIGH-SAMPLE RATE TRANSIENT DATA ACQUISITION WITH PRE-CONVERSION ACTIVITY DETECTION

Diverse applications in particle physics experiments and emerging technologies such as Lidar are driving performance increase and cost reduction in giga-hertz sampling-rate high-resolution data conversion. In applications such as these, critical aspects of the data may occur only during relatively short nanosecond portions of observation periods lasting microseconds. Data acquisition architectures that key in on regions of the data containing activity, digitize the data, and provide info to accurately measure the position of the data in time relative to a time reference are described. These architectures may facilitate system implementation and reduce overall system cost.