Design and Performance Analysis of Adaptive Discriminator

Nuclear and High Energy Physics experiments often deal with a large number of detectors. These detectors give out analog signals depicting several parameters like time of arrival, amplitude and width of these analog signals, and pulse count rate etc. Usually, fast discriminators are used to convert these analog signals to digital form, crossing a set threshold. We have designed and developed 8 channel leading edge fast adaptive discriminator module with independent programmable threshold. This module is developed on a CAMAC (IEEE 583) standard for programmability. We discuss the design aspects as well as the performance of a proto-type module in this paper.