ABSTRACT
As is evident in the chapters of this book, there are many different kinds of detector systems, and that leads to many different options in detector electronics. The role of the acquisition electronics system is to gather data from detector units and pass it to a host system for storage. This seemingly simple task presents many issues for a system designer to consider. Among them are (1) data rates and size, (2) physical space constraints, (3) power and heat issues, (4) scalability, (5) cost, and (6) special constraints (e.g., work in a magnetic field). In general, the data to be collected for each interaction in a system includes the amount of energy deposited in a detector or detector array, when the event occurred, and for imaging systems, some kind of spatial decoding of where the event occurred. For our purposes, we begin the exploration of acquisition electronics by defining two basic approaches to the design of such systems: (1) acquire all the “raw” data from the detectors (basic pulse information for each event) and (2) prequalify or process data before it is transferred to the host computer. The raw approach gives the image formation and data analysis tools maximum flexibility but can lead to very large data sets and very high data transfer rates. The prequalify approach generally uses various criteria to reject events not expected to be of interest and to preprocess some of the data to reduce the data bandwidth needed to transfer data to the host computer.
