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Dynamic Maximization of Filter Length in Digital Spectroscopy

Andrea Abba and Angelo Geraci
AbstractIn many modern applications based on detected radiation measurements, high rate and high resolution are more and more features of primary importance. In this scenario, it is well known that high resolution of measurements and high rate of pulses are conicting issues, which implies a trade-off between live time of the system and precision of measurements. We propose a digital processing technique based on adaptive lters for maximizing both achievable resolution and sustainable rate. Index TermsAdaptive lters, digital Spectroscopy, live time, rate, resolution.

I. INTRODUCTION N terms of energy measurement resolution, it is well known that the best approximation of the optimum lter corresponds to weighting functions (WFs) of time duration as long as possible in case of white noise [1]. Of course, depending on the statistical occurrence of the events, every xed choice of the WF temporal duration results in a trade-off between resolution and efciency of processing. This is true in most modern applications of radiation detectors where the achievement of both high rate and high resolution is critical. In [2] we have proposed a concept for maximizing both the resolution and the rate, by using for each pulse the WF of the longest temporal duration compliant with the distance of the pulse from the adjacent ones. In this paper we carry out the experimental setting of this technique with particular attention to both implementation and calibration. The considered reference setup consists of an analog (pre)lter followed by an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and a digital processing stage (Fig. 1). In particular, the preamplier output feeds the analog section that consists of a poletion, necessary to cancel the long exponential decay of the preamplier, and of a single pole signal lter. The quasi-exponential pulse seen at the analog output is sampled by the ADC and the sampled data stream enters the digital stage. Here, the signal rst undergoes a last digital ne pole-zero compensatin [3] and then the samples go through digital FIR lters that extract the required information (e.g., energy, occurrence time, etc.). In this regard, we are interested in measuring the pulse energy by using the best WF.
Manuscript received February 21, 2012; revised May 18, 2012; accepted June 20, 2012. Date of publication August 10, 2012; date of current version October 09, 2012. This work was supported by the Italian MIUR. The authors are with the Department of Electronics-DEI, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy (e-mail: abba@elet.polimi.it; geraci@elet.polimi.it). Color versions of one or more of the gures in this paper are available online at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org. Digital Object Identier 10.1109/TNS.2012.2206827

The baseline restoration is performed in digital form as well, by using zero-area WFs. In particular, the class of asymmetric Deightons lters [4] is implemented, whose shape can be thought as the superposition of a trapezoid and two parabolas [5]. In order to reduce pile-up phenomena, strictly nite-width weight functions are enforced. Furthermore, the exibility in implementing the lter shape allows the use of a sufciently large at top, which prevents inaccuracies due to ballistic decit and jitter. In this contribution we present a processing technique with its full implementation for both maximizing the temporal length of the lters, i.e., the resolution, and minimizing the probability of pile-up and the rejection of too close pulses, i.e., dead-time. In practice, for each pulse, the processor uses the longest lter that is consistent with the position of the two adjacent pulses. It should be considered that the proposed technique is suited for any kind of detector, providing the de-convolution process adapted to the signal released by the detection stage. II. PROPOSED TECHNIQUE Let us consider three consecutive pulses after the de-convolution stage [3], which realizes the equivalent of an analog pole/zero transfer function in the discrete time domain that returns the pulse with a shape delta-like (Fig. 2). Considering Deightons lters with at top, the longest WF available for the energy measurement of the central pulse can be expressed analytically as

(1) where is the at top length that is set a-priori, and are the distances of the at top edges from the correspondent adjacent pulses. As (1) shows, the WF is uniquely determined by , and , which means that a bench of different WFs can be stored in form of different sets of values of these parameters. In particular, the at top prevents inaccuracies due to ballistic decit, especially in case of bulky detectors, and to an approximated de-convolution of the digitized pulses that returns quasi-delta shapes. In practice, once established the experimental setup, the

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Fig. 1. Schematic representation of the considered experimental setup. The proposed technique is implemented into the digital section where the energy measurement of the pulses is performed. The graphic representation of the energy measurement procedure in the box Digital Section is only symbolic and does not represents other elaboration items, such as pulse triggering, de-convolution process and baseline restoration.

Fig. 3. One of the carried out experiments measured the energy of a periodic monochromatic signal from a pulser changing the length of the WF only through the parameter . The xed at top duration was equal to 10 samples and contained the de-convoluted pulse shape. The plot highlights an absolute spread of the measured energy values of almost one hundred percent. The set of correction factors that would return the energy values to be equal regardless of the lter length is plotted.

Fig. 2. Sequence of three delta-like pulses after the de-convolution process. Regarding to the energy measurement of the central pulse, the longest zero-area WF in the class of asymmetrical Deightons lters is plotted. Flat top length and temporal distances , of the at top extremes from adjacent pulses are marked. Fig. 4. Pulse shape at the output of the de-convolution stage for different precisions of the pole-zero compensation process, spanning in a range of 0.5% below (under-compensation) and 10% above (over-compensation) the exact compensation. It should be considered that also ringing trends can occur in the tail shape.

contribution of these effects is stationary and consequently the value can be xed once and for all. For each incoming and de-convoluted pulse, the technique consists of measuring its distance from the adjacent ones, and choosing the maximum values compatible among those stored, in order to synthesize the WF of maximum length. The procedure requires that at least samples among three consecutive pulses are stored in a buffer into the used computing device (typically a Field Programmable Gate ArrayFPGA or a Digital Signal ProcessorDSP). To build the most versatile tool, the size of this buffer should be set to the maximum allowable by the available hardware resources. Theoretically, the granularity of and values should correspond to the number of the buffer taps. The use of WFs of different length is cause of deterioration of the resolution of the energy spectrum. In fact, although the operation of de-convolution is accurate, there are always secondary poles introduced by the analog stage that are not taken into account and compensated. This determines that the signal has a quasi-delta shape showing a tail that exits the boundary of the at top. If the lter had constant length, the samples of this tail would always be weighted by the same coefcients. Conversely, in the case of variable length of the lter, even for mono-energetic pulses, the tails are multiplied by different coefcients thus giving a different estimate of energy. This results

in a broadening of the energy spectrum and its shift in case of signicantly different lengths of the lters. It has been experimentally veried that this detrimental effect can inuence the accuracy of measurement up to some tens of percent, as for instance the Fig. 3 shows. The distribution of the measured energies depending on the WF length is also a function of the de-convolution process, i.e., of the value of the de-convolution time-constant since sampled pulses have ideally exponential shape. By the way, this also accounts for different shapes of energy distributions in Fig. 3. The sensitivity depends on the different shapes of the residual tails when the pulse is de-convoluted with different time-constant values, as Fig. 4 shows. For a realistic experimental condition, Fig. 5 gives a synoptic view of the variation of the pulse energy estimate as function of the duration of the WF and of the time-constant value used in the de-convolution operation. The problem of the dependence of the energy estimate on the length of the WF requires the introduction of a calibration procedure of the system at startup and an operation of correction during the measurement process.

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Fig. 5. Error of the energy estimate of the reference curve as a function of the extension of the symmetric deightons WF and of the time-constant used in the de-convolution process. Considered time-constants are normalized to the correct value.

Fig. 7. Variation of the energy estimate of the reference curve as a function of the extension of the WF, according to a xed value of the at-top duration and to the maximum interval tolerated between adjacent pulses. The plot also shows the curve of the corrective coefcients that multiplied by the estimates of energy correspondent to the same values return the correct normalized energy of the reference curve.

Fig. 6. Calculated reference shapes of the sampled and de-convoluted input pulse. The quotation of the x-axis in continuous time is not relevant.

Fig. 8. Error of the energy estimate of the reference curve as a function of the extension of the symmetric deightons WF and of the time-constant used in the de-convolution process. Time-constants are normalized to the correct value. Arbitrary units of amplitude values are the same of Fig. 5 and, consequently, the compensation has reduced the error of ve orders of magnitude.

III. CALIBRATION We assume that the shape of the ideally exponential sampled pulse, normalized to unit area and called reference curve in the following, is stationary during an experiment. At system startup, the calibration procedure begins with the construction of the reference curve by averaging a statistically signicant set of sampled signals, which can be easily caught by suitable experiments. In addition to calibration, the reference curve is used to estimate the time constant with which we initialize the de-convolution phase. This step returns the normalized reference shapes of input and de-convoluted pulses, as shown in Fig. 6. Once the maximum length of the WF and the extension of the at top are set, the calibration process proceeds to measure the energy of the reference as a function of and values. For ease of explanation, a symmetric Deightons WF, i.e., equal to , is used to illustrate the technique in the following. The variation of the energy estimation of the reference pulse as a function of WF extension is represented in Fig. 7, which also shows the sequence of corrective factors that multiplied by the correspondent energy estimates would return a constant value of energy regardless of the lter length. For each value of , the operation is repeated for every value of and the surface of corrective coefcients, which are functions of the variables , , is synthetized.

Fig. 9. Possible scenario of the circular buffer content. It is evident from the timeline of the processing stages CONV 1 and CONV 2 that the same samples may have to be used twice for the calculation of energies of different pulses. This requires the implementation of two parallel processing branches (convolution stage). Note that graphics representing the WFs is only symbolic and does not represents the deightons lters that are actually used.

The operation of correction during the measurement process consists of normalizing the calculated energy value of the incoming pulse by the correction factor corresponding to the parameters , of the WF used. After the application of the correction, the energy estimate does not depend signicantly on both the WF length and the de-convolution time-constant value, as Fig. 8 demonstrates. IV. IMPLEMENTATION Since the processor operates in real time synthesizing for each pulse a different WF, the necessary computing power is con-

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Fig. 10. Data-path and ow of processing for energy calculation with WF as long as possible. Note that graphics representing the WFs is only symbolic and does not represents the deightons lters with at top that are actually used. The length of the at-top is omitted in the scheme.

siderable and requires a quite sophisticated computing architecture. In support of this assertion, consider that in case of lters positioned as close as possible to each other and maximum rate,roughly 900 Moperations/s are required. In the presented realization, the technique has been implemented in a digital spectrometer based on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). In order to minimize the error due to machine nite precision, the entire architecture has been developed in single-precision 32-bit oating-point data format (8-bit exponent and 24-bit mantissa). We have used standard Intellectual Property blocks in the FPGA logic while no resources of the embedded processor of the device have been used. The time cost of this architectural choice has been veried be compliant with the maximum data rate xed by the ADC sampling frequency. According to the experimental setup topology of Fig. 1, the ideally exponential signal at the output of the analog section is sampled at the rate of 100 Msamples/s (MSPS) with 16-bit resolution and the samples are converted in oating-point format. The sampled data pass through the de-convolution stage that processes the pulses in the stream to having delta-like shape (Fig. 6). The stream enters a circular buffer that is a xed-size memory in which the last tap coincides with the rst one. The buffer has 4096 taps, which is the maximum interval containing three consecutive pulses that can be observed in the built implementation of the technique. The buffer content is scanned by a threshold-based trigger procedure that detects the presence and the position of pulses. For each pulse, the values of and parameters are calculated. As the Fig. 9 graphically puts in evidence, the energy estimation of pulses in general requires the presence of two parallel processing branches called convolution stages. This is due to the fact that in the time interval between two adjacent pulses one rising edge and one falling edge of WF may have to be allocated. The whole data-path and ow of processing described are shown in Fig. 10. Since a customized WF has to be synthesized for each pulse, an efcient generation architecture is mandatory. For this purpose, (1) that represents the WF shape as function of the free

parameters , , , is implemented by grouping the numeric coefcients in the terms , , ,

(2) As Fig. 11 shows, the terms , , , can be properly combined by means of multiplexing stages in order to synthetize the characteristic parts of the WF, i.e., ascent, descent, and at-top. The global parameters , , , are tabulated and stored in memory resources of the processing device with double-precision oating-point resolution. In the present implementation into a FPGA device, the used memory data structure is a look-up table (LUT) [6], where , values address the correspondent , , , memory locations. The number of different shapes of lters that are feasible in real time is limited by the memory available for storing the different sets . For instance, 4 memory blocks of 2 k-words x 9 bit are required to generate 256 different asymmetric WFs that are more than enough to cover a wide range of experimental conditions. The architecture has been tested both on a Xilinx Virtex-5 FX-100T device and on a Xilinx Spartan-6 LX-25 device, which are very far in terms of performance and cost [7]. The former is able of operate over 300 MHz (i.e., 300 MSPS sampling rate) with less than 5% of resource occupancy, the latter uses 60% of available resources operating at 100 MHz (i.e., 100 MSPS). Considering a minimum lter length of 30 samples, the processor into the Spartan-6 device is able to operate with live time of 50% at 2 Mcounts/s, with respect to a live time of 80% of the Virtex-5 solution. A screenshot of a sequence of de-convoluted pulses and related WFs synthetized by the presented technique is depicted in Fig. 12. V. EXPERIMENTS The reference processing setup is a digital pulse processor based on a Xilinx Spartan 6 LX-25 FPGA [8]. For completeness of discussion, we recall that the experiments reported in [2]

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Fig. 11. (a) Diagram of the architecture that implementing (1) generates the WFs. Starting from the top of the picture, the discrete values and the squared ones of the time variable multiply the outputs of the rst two multiplexers that correspond to the coefcients of the regarded construction phase of the WF, i.e., 00 ascent, 01 at-top, 10 descent, 11 reset. The multiplication coefcient of the output of the third multiplexer is in turn the output of a selection procedure. The samples of the synthetized WF and the input data are multiplied and accumulated to perform the calculation of the central value of their convolution, i.e., of the area and so of the energy of the pulse. The signal energy strobe checks out the end of the convolution process. (b) The and values address the memory locations of the correspondent , , , . (c) Example of synthetized WF with the codes corresponding to the different construction phases.

Fig. 12. Example of ltering process of a sequence of de-convoluted pulses. As already underlined, the technique generates deightons WFs with at-top, both symmetrical and asymmetrical.

conrmed that short lters have poor resolution and are suited for processing very close pulses, while long lters guarantee better resolution but can be used only in case of slow rate, i.e., distant pulses. In both cases, a live time around 90% has been demonstrated to be achievable. These results have been veried in several different experimental conditions. For instance, Fig. 13 shows the spectra of two X-ray sources at different activity obtained by using WFs of different length. Particular attention has been reserved to the validation of the calibration procedure. For this purpose, an experiment has been carried out with articial pulses at constant different rates that correspond to different values of the parameter . Specically, four different rates of pulses at two energies have been generated and the spectra have been measured. First, the spectra have been grown without correction of measured values [Fig. 14(a)]

and then activating the calibration procedure [Fig. 14(b)]. The shift in the peaks in the rst case is evident. This means that with no calibration the spectra remain separated even if they physically belong to the same spectrum. With calibration procedure activated, the measured spectra grow up superposed and can be summed together. From experiments the efciency of the algorithm is evident. For instance, using a X-ray source of emitting at a rate of 750 kcounts/s and a silicon drift detector (SDD), we measured an energy spectrum with resolution of 230 eV and efciency of 88% with a lter temporal length equal to 200 ns. In the same source conditions but using a set of 64 lters with temporal lengths equally distributed between 200 ns and 1600 ns, we built a spectrum with resolution of 184 eV and efciency maintained at 88%. The same experiment has been repeated changing the source rate to 160 kcounts/s. With a single lter s long we measured a spectrum with resolution of 142 eV and efciency of 85%. The resolution has been lowered to 131 eV just using a set of 64 lters with temporal lengths equally spaced between s and 6.8 ns with the same efciency of the former measurement. VI. CONCLUSION A processing technique based on lters of different length is proposed and has been investigated and implemented. The user sets WFs with different lengths, from the longest that is optimum for energy resolution down to the shortest that complies the rate specication of the application. The system automatically and in real time synthetizes the best lter for each single event measuring the time distance between the current event and the two adjacent ones.

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Fig. 13. (a) Spectrum of a source of low activity (20 kcps) with live time of 88% and resolution of 5.8 electrons, and (b) spectrum of a activity (800 kcps) with live time of 90% and resolution of 20.9 electrons, that is signicantly worse than the previous case as expected.

source of high

lution with the constraints preset by the user. In particular, if two pulses are closer than the temporal length of the shortest lter, they are discarded. If two pulses are closer than the temporal duration of the de-convolutor pulse response, they are undistinguishable and cause pile-up. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank L. Bombelli, R. Alberti, and T. Frizzi for their support in the experimental activity. REFERENCES
[1] A. Geraci and E. Gatti, Optimum lters for charge measurements in presence of 1/f current noise, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A, vol. 361, pp. 277289, 1995. [2] A. Abba, A. Geraci, and G. Ripamonti, Digital adaptive ltering for resolution and live-time maximization, presented at the IEEE Nuclear Science Symp., Valencia, Spain, Oct. 2329, 2011. [3] A. Geraci, A. Pullia, and G. Ripamonti, Automatic pole-zero/zeropole digital compensator for high-resolution spectroscopy: Design and experiments, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. 46, no. 4, pp. 817821, Aug. 1999. [4] M. O. Deighton, Minimum-noise lters with good low-frequency rejection, IEEE Trans. Nucl. Sci., vol. 16, no. 5, pp. 6875, Oct. 1969. [5] A. Geraci, I. Rech, E. Gatti, and G. Ripamonti, Shared baseline restoration at minimum noise for high resolution spectroscopy, Nucl. Instrum. Meth. A, vol. 482, pp. 441448, 2002. [6] R. J. Francis, A tutorial on logic synthesis for lookup-table based FPGAs, presented at the Int. Conf. Comp.-Aided Design, ICCAD, Santa Clara, CA, Nov. 812, 1992. [7] [Online]. Available: http://www.xilinx.com/products/silicon-devices/ fpga/index.htm [8] R. Alberti, T. Frizzi, S. Moser, A. Abba, A. Geraci, F. Caponio, P. Baruzzi, G. Ripamonti, and L. Bombelli, Digital pulse processor for high-rate high-resolution X and gamma ray spectroscopy, presented at the IEEE Nucl. Sci. Symp., Valencia, Spain, Oct. 2329, 2011.

Fig. 14. Spectra of articial pulses of two energies at constant different rates that correspond to different values of the parameter , i.e., equal to 1, 2, 5, 14 normalized to the minimum considered value (a) Spectra corresponding to the different values with correction procedure de-activated (b) Spectra calculated with correction procedure activated. The vertical reference lines between the subplots put in evidence that the correction procedure aligns the generated spectra, as is consistent with the reality.

This procedure allows to recover in real time the maximum number of piled up events maintaining best performance in reso-