High Spatial Resolution Detector System Based on Reconfigurable Dual-FPGA Approach for Coincidence Measurements.

Time-resolved spectroscopic and electron-ion coincidence techniques are essential to study dynamic processes in materials or chemical compounds. For this type of analysis, it is necessary to have detectors capable of providing, in addition to image-related information, the time of arrival for each individual detected particle ("x, y, time"). The electronics capable of handling such sensors must meet requirements achievable only with time-to-digital converters (TDC) with a resolution on the order of tens of picoseconds and the use of a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) to manage data acquisition and transmission.

Digital instrument with configurable hardware and firmware for multi-channel time measures.

A new digital instrument for timing of events is presented. It is based on a reconfigurable, high-performance, 16-channel time-to-digital converter implemented in a Xilinx 7 Series 28-nm field programmable gate array device. Each channel provides timestamps with a least significant bit of 2 ps that states the resolution, whereas instead the single-shot precision is below 12.