A PC ADD-ON CARD FOR MOSSBAUER DATA ACQUISITION-SYSTEM

A user friendly Mossbauer data acquisition add-on card for IBM compatible PC has been designed and fabricated. It is a firmware which acquires data and shares the CPU of the host PC to transfer the data into the PC memory. The card generates the wave form for the drive unit, generates dwell time marker pulses and counts the energy selected single channel analyzer (SCA) pulses. The significant feature of the system is that the counting of the SCA pulses is done with two counters, resulting in zero dead time. Two temporary dual port RAMs (DP RAM) on board enable real time data acquisition. The software which controls the hardware is menu driven and user friendly and works under DOS environment. An on line display of the spectrum is provided with a cursor which enables the inspection of counts in any channel during the acquisition. The current version of the spectrometer has a capacity of 2048 channels and this can be extended easily up to 8192 channels.