Multichannel pulse height analyzer

[GCompton]

I want to use an Analog Discovery 3 as a multichannel pulse height analyzer. The signal is from a photo-multiplier tube (PMT) which outputs pulses that are between 2-30 ns in duration and 50-500 mV in pulse height. The time between pulses is random, but on the order of 100 ns. Is there a way to analyze the area (height) of each triggered pulse and generate a histogram of pulse areas (heights)?

[attila]

Hi @GCompton

The AD3 bandwidth of 9/30MHz may be too low for such pulse lengths.
The device has sampling clock option trigger IOs but this requires digital level signal. Now I tried to enable a sample on analog trigger event but this with the current 'firmware' has a minimum trigger to sampling delay of 12cycles, 96-120ns
The only eventual option I see is capturing more data, with min/max sampling and processing it.

[GCompton]

Thank you for your response @attila. Supposing we can relax the time constraints, e.g. pulse width and delay are respectively on the order of a microsecond and 10 microseconds. Is there a way to log a set of measurements from a buffer of triggered events into a single csv file? I have only figured out how to save a csv file for each triggered event in the buffer, but I would like one file with the measurements from all triggered events.

[attila]

Hi @GCompton

With the current sw version you can select Trigger 1 to output 'Scope Detector' and select Sampling Clock T1
This will store one sample for each trigger event with 15 cycle delay, 150ns delay for 100MHz or 120ns with 125MHz system frequency.
The next version will let you select directly 'Scope Detector' as Sampling Clock.