A new statistical approach for digital triggering of events from radiation detectors

A digital trigger technique for high-resolution nuclear spectroscopy is presented. The method allows very low-level discrimination as well as high time resolving capabilities with a single processing architecture. Self-calibration and self-optimization of processor algorithm are carried out. The circuit can be implemented in a configurable device (FPGA or DSP) and exploits at best hardware resources already allocated for other signal processing steps. Particular care is taken in order to minimize the necessary hardware resources.