A high performance reconfigurable hardware platform for digital pulse processing

This paper presents a new reconfigurable hardware platform which uses both digital signal processors (DSP) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) to attain high resolution and real-time processing in nuclear spectrometry experiments. The module was designed in order to provide a high digital pulse processing (DPP) yield with the capacity of being reconfigurable according to the experimental conditions and the desired data output. This allows unprecedented real time processing capabilities implemented in the FPGA such as pulse pileup correction through adaptive filtering and effective signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) control and optimization. The module uses a Virtex-II Pro FPGA (Xilinx) and a DSP from the TMS320C64xx family (Texas Instruments) and is implemented on a PCI board to be used in a host workstation. Special emphasis is given to the scalability of the module along with the potential capacity of being used as a portable stand-alone instrument. This reconfigurable hardware platform allows us to simultaneously benefit from the advantages of the hardware based digital spectrometers, namely, their high throughput, and of the flexibility of the software based configurations. Besides, this same platform can be used as a general purpose high-speed data acquisition and processing unit.