Multichannel Digital Pulse Processor for Bi-Dimensional Detector Arrays

We present an innovative readout and processing architecture for multi-channel applications that allows the direct connection to the output of the charge preamplifiers and grants the possibility to fully exploit advantages of digital processing. The processor is constituted by the collection of modules (3,2×2,8 in.). Each one manages 8 channels and integrates the hardware and firmware architecture to process the data. The power consumption of each module is below 5 W including analog front-end, ADC, and FPGA de-vice. Each module is connected by a serial line at 400 Mbit/s to a communication board, which collects information up to 64 detectors and delivers it to a reference host PC through USB 3.0. The complete architecture has been prototyped and tested