Design and Construction of a Digital Multichannel Analyzer for HPGe Detector Using Digital Signal Processing Technique

The outstanding advantage of digital signal processing (DSP) techniques and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technology is capable of improving the quality of the experimental measurements for nuclear radiation. In this article, a compact DMCA 8 K was designed and manufactured using DSP technique based on FPGA technology. In particular, the output of the preamplifier is completely processed by digital techniques which are obtained from the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) to calculate the baseline, DC offset, energy peaks, pile up, threshold discrimination and then the form of energy spectrum. The Spartan-6 board is used as a hardware for the development of the digital multichannel analyzer (DMCA), which is equipped with the 14-bit AD6645 with 62.5 Msps sample rate. The application software for instrument control, data acquisition and data processing was written under C++ builder via the RS-232 interface. The designed DMCA system has been tested with a HPGe detector using gamma sources of ⁶⁰Co and ¹³⁷Cs and a reference pulser.