Development of a digital front-end electronics for the CdTe PET systems

We report on the development of a digital front-end electronics for high resolution CdTe PET systems. The energy and timing information are extracted through digital processing of the detector signals, digitized at the preamplifier stage. A cost effective preamplifier system and efficient digital algorithms for time pickoff and energy measurement are described. The effects of signals sampling rate and geometrical parameters of the detectors are explored. It is shown that with digitizers with 160 MSample/s sampling rates and 8 bit resolution, a timing resolution close to the analog results can be achieved. The advantages of the system include reasonable cost, short development time and ease of modification.