Low cost pulse shaper for use with silicon PIN diodes

Abstract

A flexible, small, and low-cost analog pulse shaper and amplifier circuit has been developed for silicon PIN photodiode detectors. The shaping amplifier produces both a fast negative output signal with less than 10-ns rise time for timing measurements and a slow positive output signal with peaking times from 500 ns to 10 mu s for energy measurements. The gain for the two signals can be set independently. The maximum output amplitude is -1.5 V for the fast signal and +10 V for the slow signal. The resolution for the energy channel was <10 keV electronic contribution, giving a total of 17 keV with alpha particles. The resolution for the timing channel was <1 ns electronics, with a total of 2 ns with alpha particles. The whole circuit fits on a board of 7.5 cm*3.5 cm.<>