A Spartan 6 FPGA-based data acquisition system for dedicated imagers in nuclear medicine

We present the development of a four-channel low-cost hardware system for data acquisition, with application in dedicated nuclear medicine imagers. A 12 bit octal channel high-speed analogue to digital converter, with up to 65 Msps sampling rate, was used for the digitization of analogue signals. The digitized data are fed into a field programmable gate array (FPGA), which contains an interface to a bank of double data rate 2 (DDR2)-type memory. The FPGA processes the digitized data and stores the results into the DDR2. An ethernet link was used for data transmission to a personal computer. The embedded system was designed using Xilinx's embedded development kit (EDK) and was based on Xilinx's Microblaze soft-core processor. The system has been evaluated using two different discrete optical detector arrays (a position-sensitive photomultiplier tube and a silicon photomultiplier) with two different pixelated scintillator arrays (BGO, LSO:Ce). The energy resolution for both detectors was approximately 25%. A clear identification of all crystal elements was achieved in all cases. The data rate of the system with this implementation can reach 60 Mbits s(-1). The results have shown that this FPGA data acquisition system is a compact and flexible solution for single-photon-detection applications.