Pixie-4

The Pixie-4 family members are 4-channel all-digital waveform acquisition and spectrometer cards based on the CompactPCI/PXI Express (PXIe) standard. The members differ in terms of data interface (PCI or PCI Express) and digitization rate (75-125 MHz and 500 MHz). The PXI backplane is also used to distribute clocks and trigger signals between multiple Pixie modules. With a large variety of CompactPCI/PXI Express processor, controller or I/O modules being commercially available, complete data acquisition and processing systems can be built in a small form factor.

We designed the slower Pixie-4 family members with HPGe signals in mind, the faster members for timing with fast scintillators. That doesn’t mean that’s the only systems they works with. The on-board filtering processes signals from virtually any radiation detector with exponentially decaying pulses. The pulse processing logic also supports pulse-shape analysis, constant fraction discrimination, and coincidence gating. This allow you to focus on just the events of interest while ignoring the rest

A fully featured graphical user interface is used to operate the system and view results. Custom analysis scripts can be added by the user. The underlying C API library handles communication between the hardware and host system and can be used by user programs to collect data programmatically. The system collects a full suite of data about the signals including waveforms, time stamps, energies, and other event information. You can collect these data using the list-mode data output for offline processing.