Highly flexible PC-based data acquisition system for TOF measurements with pulsed neutron beams

Neutron spectroscopy has become the dominant scattering method at pulsed neutron sources. Therefore efforts have been made at KFA Julich to develop a flexible and inexpensive data acquisition system which fulfills the requirements of several very different time of flight experiments. This system is based on a standard EISA personal computer. The different modes of operation are implemented by different configurations of a user programmable ASIC. This ASIC is the core of an EISA interface adapter in the PC. The interface accepts the detector pulses from the experiment, evaluates the time information and increments the according location in the PC memory, that acts as a multi parameter multichannel analyzer. Experiment control including life display and subsequent evaluation are performed as Windows tasks