Analog and Digital Signal Processing for Nuclear Instrumentation

The recent integration technologies have provided important computing capacities in all aspects of the signal processing domain. Nuclear science benefits from the advances made in the domain of telecommunication. The most recent analog-to-digital converters can reach several Gigahertz, while heterogeneous designs allow the combination of different technologies enabling fast and real-time signal processing. Nevertheless, most of the nuclear applications today are designed to be executed offline, for example, using MATLAB or Python. This chapter addresses some of the ways to implement nuclear applications in real time using the most recent technologies by combining analog and digital approaches. The contributions of this chapter are as follows: (a) the detailed description of the steps of the signal acquisition chains for organic scintillators to the information processing, including examples from the most recent researches; (b) the provision of design guidelines to make an efficient partitioning between the analog and digital parts of a design. For the digital parts, it provides approaches to split an algorithm between glue logic and state-of-the-art electronics such as Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) or ASIC and high-level programs embedded on microcontrollers or microprocessors.