A new ADC circuit for nuclear spectroscopy based on digital signal processing techniques

A 12-bit analog-to-digital converter (ADC) circuit for nuclear spectroscopy applications was developed using a digital signal processor (DSP) as the central processing element.

The DSP runs a program that builds the distribution function of data collected by the ADC (the multichannel analyzer algorithm) and simultaneously corrects the ADC differential nonlinearity (DNL) by the sliding scale method. The acquisition routine runs in 4 μs.

The conversion time, when the faster versions of the ADC are used, is well below 10 μs. The resulting DNL is better than 0.4% and the integral nonlinearity <0.002%.