A Data acquisition architecture for a RPC-Based small animal pet

On-going work suggests that a RPC-based small animal pet camera can be built with a FWHM resolution below 0.5 mm and at a very competitive cost. The camera being developed demands a high-resolution data acquisition system along with very good trigger coincidence detection and on-line data reduction. In this paper the actual system specifications are given and a solution is discussed. The elected solution includes the development of four similar data acquisition modules, each with 16 channels based on 12-bit, 70 MSPS ADCs with LVDS outputs, dedicated memory, trigger logic, processing unit, and a USB 2.0 interface. The trigger and data processing logic of each module were placed inside a Xilinx-4 Virtex FGPA. The proposed solution allows a cheap and efficient system to be constructed in a PC-centric way.