A Low-Cost Large-Scale Magnetostrictive Spark Chamber Digitizing System

A compact low-cost large-scale digitizing system for spark chambers has been developed. This system uses a single clocked scaler and a high-speed integrated-circuit memory. The number of words of memory required is equal to the sum of the number of sparks expected in all the chamber gaps plus the number of start fiducial pulses expected (one per transducer channel). Each magnetostrictive transducer is assigned certain addresses in the memory. As pulses arrive from the sensors, the current contents of the scaler are stored in the appropriate preassigned addresses of the memory. To avoid synchronization problems, a Graycode scaler is used. The memory is made of 16-bit integrated-circuit scratch pad memory elements. The system could be operated with the clock frequencies of up to 40 MHz. The storage capacity of the system is expandable. This system is compared with other known systems.