Pixie Hybrid

The Pixie Hybrid is a 4-channel all-digital waveform acquisition and spectrometer card based on the CompactPCI/PXI Express (PXIe) standard. 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 Pixie Hybrid for flexibility to support a variety of radiation detectors. Slower digitization variants are intended for high precision spectroscopy with HPGe detectors. Higher speed digitization variants are intended for fast timing with scintillators.  That doesn’t mean that’s the only systems they work 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.