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Radioactive Nuclear-Decay Detection Customer Case The customer has a requirement for PC-based waveform digitizer cards to digitize shaped pulses derived from nuclear-decay detectors. These pulses vary in their rate (frequency of occurrence) and amplitude. Their shape is approximately Gaussian with a full-width at half the maximum amplitude (FWHM) of 3-5 microseconds. The characterization of each pulse is critical for the accurate and precise determination of the activity of radioactive materials. These materials have very low count-rates (0.02 pulses per minute) to relatively high count-rates (>1000 pulses per minute). Important to the measurement process are the speed and reliability of [...]

Neutrino Detection System Customer Case Neutrinos are tiny (possibly massless) neutral elementary particles which interact with matter via the weak nuclear force. The weakness of the weak force gives neutrinos the property that matter is almost transparent to them. The sun, and all other stars, produce neutrinos copiously due to nuclear fusion and decay processes within the core. Since they rarely interact, these neutrinos pass through the sun and the earth (and you) unhindered. Other sources of neutrinos include exploding stars (supernovae), relic neutrinos (from the birth of the universe) and nuclear power plants (in fact a lot of [...]

Nuclear Particle Location Customer Case The customer studies nuclear particles traveling in an electrically charged medium. The particles emit two types of short 53 MHz signal bursts. The first type lasts for 1.6 ms, the second type lasts for 6 ms. The customer had to capture these bursts in at least two locations and analyze their amplitudes in order to determine the position and some of the characteristics of the nuclear particles. The application requires two channels of capture at speeds of at least 500 MS/s. The depth of capture at 1 GS/s is 6,000 samples for the 6 [...]

Ozone Profiling Lidar System Customer Case The customer is designing an ozone-profiling lidar system for measuring the concentration of ozone from ground level up to about 4 kilometer (km) altitude. The system operates in the ultraviolet range and uses multiple receiver telescopes to cover the range. The dynamic range of the signal is enormous, so small aperture telescopes are used to collect backscattered light from low altitudes and large ones are used to collect backscattered light from high altitudes. The customer is operating simultaneously at three laser wavelengths, and the current design requires a total of nine photodetectors (three [...]

High-Spatial Resolution Lidar Customer Case In Lidar, which is Laser Radar, spatial resolution is limited by the laser pulse width. This customer's laser pulse width is 3.5 ns. The total range interrogated by the Lidar system will be on the order of 250 meters. The customer needs to digitize the Lidar signal at 500 MS/s into 8 MegaSamples of memory. 8-bit digitizer resolution will be sufficient and they would also prefer to keep software programming at an absolute minimum. GaGe Case Solution Had the customer required higher resolution, say 12 or 14-bit, and sampling rates of 100 MS/s, then [...]