A digital system for artificial generation of images from radiation detectors

We present the progress performed in the development of a digital fully programmable emulator of radiation detectors and front-end electronics of image acquisition systems. The instrument has 64 independent channels with the capability of growing an image that has been a-priori programmed. The growth faithfully emulates the real-time behavior of an acquisition array constituted by 64 detectors, also based on photomultipliers, that are exposed to a source spatially distributed. The emulation process achieves the performance of 3□106 counts per second, i.e. emulated samples of generated charge. The instrument has also the features of adding spatial and temporal pile-up and noise with fully programmable characteristics. The presence of DACs clocked at 140 MSPS makes available the output stream also in analog format.