Design and Implementation of the Accumulating Algorithm of Digital Signal Averager

To satisfy the need of on-board accumulation in time-of-flight mass spectrometer (TOF-MS) applications, the paper presents an accumulation algorithm in FPGA based on pipeline and ping-pong operation. The accumulation algorithm is verified on a signal averager hardware platform which takes XILiNX VIRTEX-5 FPGA as the processing core. The cache module, on-chip accumulation, and USB transmission module is implemented. Testing results show that the range of time measurement is 32us, the minimum time resolution is 333ps and signal to noise ratio (SNR) is improved effectively. The accumulation algorithm is stable and reliable, so it can be widely used in the measurement of high-resolution time interval and pulse amplitude.