Abstract
This work presents an image acquisition system designed for use with position-sensitive detectors (PSD). The system is based on a high-resolution time-to-digital converter (TDC) and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The detectors use gas as the absorbing medium and employ two delay lines to determine the coordinates of each detected particle. By reading the position information provided by the delay lines, the system encodes the incidence position of each event within the detector window. The TDC converts the timing information from the delay lines into digital data, while the FPGA processes each event, controls system operation, and manages communication with a personal computer. Images with a resolution of 256 × 256 pixels are stored in onboard memory, and this resolution can be increased to 512 × 512 pixels through a time-multiplexing technique. The system supports a maximum data acquisition rate of 1.2 million events per second.