Applications of Digital Pulse Acquisition Systems and Software Defined Electronics in Advanced Teaching Labs

The CAEN DT5790N is a digital acquisition system which houses two high voltage supplies and two highspeed (12 bits, 250MHz) waveform digitizers. These in tandem with the use of post processing software combine to produce a Software Defined Electronic (SDE) system that can be used in several advanced teaching lab experiments.  An FPGA and built-in software can be used to display the pulse waveform and produce  a time-stamped output (4 ns intervals)  in a text list  for post processing, e.g. via MATLAB, Python, LabVIEW, ROOT, BASIC,etc. The SDE can then be reconfigured and used to run many nuclear and other experiments in an advances teaching lab course. This serves to expose students to modern state-of-the-art data acquisition technology. Experiments such as Fission Neutron Time-of-Flight, Compton Scattering, Co-60 Gamma Coincidence and Na-22 Gamma-Gamma Annihilation are well suited for SDE. The SDE system also provides a very adaptive and cost-effective substitute for NIM or CAMAC electronics as SDE can be easily set up with only a single digitizer box and computer for many different experiments. Typical data using SDE we have developed for several advanced teaching lab experiments will be shown.