Real time pulse processors for physics experiments-simulation and implementation

To have a better energy resolution in a gamma ray spectroscopy, an appropriate shaping of the nuclear pulses is necessary. The shaping improves two parameters namely the counting rate and signal to noise ratio (SNR). Trapezoidal, Gaussian and Cusp - these three shaping algorithms have been simulated to assess the suitability in terms of these two parameters. The energy resolution in the spectrum depends on these parameters. The shaping algorithms are implemented using field programmable gate array (FPGA) at 100MHz clock with 100MSPS ADC. In multi channel analyzer (MCA) DAQ setup, FPGA based shaper hardware is used to study the shaping algorithm with the help of the spectrum of ⁶⁰Co and ¹³⁷Cs as radiation sources. This paper has reported the results of the real time implementations of this work.