Hardware emulation of two-dimensional arrays of detectors

In this contribution, we present a digital fully configurable emulator of radiation detectors and front-end electronics of image acquisition systems. The instrument has 64 independent channels with the capability of growing an image that has been a-priori programmed. The growth faithfully emulates the real-time behavior of an acquisition array constituted by 64 detectors (either based on silicon or photomultipliers) that are exposed to a source spatially distributed. The implemented emulation process achieves the performance of 10⁶ counts per second, i.e. emulated samples of generated charge. The instrument has also the features of adding spatial and temporal pile-up and noise with fully programmable characteristics. Each output channel consists of a digital stream that can be converted in analog shape by means of DAC clocked at 125 MSPS.