Design Concepts of a Transient Signal Recorder for Operation in Pulsed Ionizing Radiation

The feasibility of a recorder for measuring transient radiation effects, and which is radiation hardened so that it minimizes ionizing effects on the instrumentation itself, has been investigated by designing, fabricating, and testing a 10 channel analog sampling recorder which samples an input signal of ± 6 mA at 100 MHz sampling rate for 100 ns period. The instantaneous sample values are stored as magnetic flux in successive thin magnetic films of a channel. Upon non-destructive readout of the thin films, a time amplitude reconstruction of the input signal is made to within ± 15% of full scale. The system shows radiation hardness in excess of 1010 r/sec, except for the interface amplifier which is hard to 5 × 109 r/sec.