Auto-adaptive trigger and pulse extraction for digital processing in nuclear instrumentation

International audienceThis paper presents a novel auto-adaptive method for pulse triggering and extraction. Pulse triggering uses a threshold that must be placed as close as possible to the noise level. We do this by means of an adaptive threshold level based on real-time noise level estimation. A dynamic estimation of the pulse length is also used for pulse selection. The proposed approach is largely insensitive to noise and enables autonomous extraction of pulses regardless of their shape, height or length. The proposed approach can be used with numerous types of detectors from an analog-to-digital converter, and can be used in conjunction with various pulse processing techniques such as spectroscopy, counting or neutron-gamma discrimination. Moreover, the proposed method enables efficient pulse pile-up detection. This paper demonstrates the feasibility of a completely generic pulse trigger and shows that it compares favorably to a representative panel of other pulse extraction approaches disclosed in the literature