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Figure 10. CR-160 Gaussian shaping amplifier evaluation board. Copied from http://www.cremat.com [9].
The CR-160 includes an adjustable low-noise wide-band amplifier having gains adjustable from 1 to 0 to 100. Combined with the CR-200-X gain of 10, this allows an overall gain of 1 to 0 to 1000. Furthermore, an inverted-polarity signal is available, as well as adjustments for pole-zero correction and DC offset.[9.] In order to calibrate the sensor there is a number of potentiometers: Fine Gain to adjust the gain from 0 to 100; Pole-Zero to adjust the baseline of the output; Offset Adjustment; Signal Polarity;
The whole system has analog nature without any conversion to digital format. A/D conversion is typically happening in PC or various embedded systems. For instance, pulse height analyzer (PHA) is an instrument used in nuclear and elementary particle physics research which accepts electronic pulses of varying heights from particle and event detectors, digitizes the pulse heights, and saves the number of pulses of each height in registers or channels for later spectral analysis.
Last but not least, there is a possibility to read out the radiation signal when multichannel detectors are used using application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC). An example is AGIPD: Adaptive Gain Integrated Pixel detector (Figure 11).
Figure 11. AGIPD detector. Copied from http://indico.cern.ch/event/137337/material/slides/0?contribId=10&sessionId=5 [11].
AGIPD detector consists of 64x64 pixels sensor array which is connected to ASIC circuit (Figure 12).
Figure 12. ASIC readout circuit. Copied from http://indico.cern.ch/event/137337/material/slides/0?contribId=10&sessionId=5 [11].
Inside the ASIC there are added capacitors which help to minimize the noise. The stored analog value is multiplexed and transferred then to ADCs. After that the signal is proceed to column bus from where it goes to DAQ system. [11.]
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