Multichannel analyzer with 'optimum' digital pulse processing

A complete digital spectroscopy system supporting the 'optimum' filtering has been designed, built and tested. The optimum filtering has proven to be the best processing algorithm with respect to the achievable energy resolution. We have succeeded in implementing the full system in a PC: a dedicated board for the data acquisition and the CPU of the PC itself for the digital processing. The processing code is written in C-language and focused on reducing the execution time so that a throughput of 1000 cps is reached with a Pentium 100 MHz processing 12 samples for each pulse. After the optimization of the code, the processing time increases linearly with the number of sample per pulse while the algorithm is quadratic. A large class of high resolution and medium rate applications can fruitfully take advantage of this 'optimum' digital spectrometer.