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Licensed Unlicensed Requires Authentication Published by De Gruyter March 3, 2014

A novel method based solely on field programmable gate array (FPGA) units enabling measurement of time and charge of analog signals in positron emission tomography (PET)

  • Marek Pałka EMAIL logo , Paweł Moskal , Tomasz Bednarski , Piotr Białas , Eryk Czerwiński , Łukasz Kapłon , Andrzej Kochanowski , Grzegorz Korcyl , Jakub Kowal , Paweł Kowalski , Tomasz Kozik , Wojciech Krzemień , Marcin Molenda , Szymon Niedźwiecki , Monika Pawlik , Lech Razyński , Zbigniew Rudy , Piotr Salabura , Neha Gupta-Sharma , Michał Silarski , Artur Słomski , Jerzy Smyrski , Adam Strzelecki , Wojciech Wiślicki , Marcin Zieliński and Natalia Zoń

Abstract

This article presents an application of a novel technique for precise measurements of time and charge based solely on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) device for positron emission tomography (PET). The described approach simplifies electronic circuits, reduces the power consumption, lowers costs, merges front-end electronics with digital electronics, and also makes more compact final design. Furthermore, it allows to measure time when analog signals cross a reference voltage at different threshold levels with a very high precision of ~15 ps (rms) and thus enables sampling of signals in a voltage domain.

Keywords: FPGA; TDC; TOF-PET

Corresponding author: Marek Pałka, Institute of Physics, Jagiellonian University, Reymonta 4, Cracow 30-049, Poland, E-mail:

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge the technical and administrative support by M. Adamczyk, T. Gucwa-Ryś, A. Heczko, M. Kajetanowicz, G. Konopka-Cupiał, J. Majewski, W. Migdał, and A. Misiak and the financial support by the Polish National Center for Development and Research through grant INNOTECH-K1/IN1/64/159174/NCBR/12, the Foundation for Polish Science through MPD programme, and the EU and MSHE Grant No. POIG.02.03.00-161 00-013/09.

Conflict of interest statement

Authors’ conflict of interest disclosure: The authors stated that there are no conflicts of interest regarding the publication of this article. Research funding played no role in thestudy design; in the collection, analysis, and interpretationof data; in the writing of the report; or in the decision tosubmit the report for publication.

Research funding: None declared.

Employment or leadership: None declared.

Honorarium: None declared.

References

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Received: 2013-10-25
Accepted: 2014-2-4
Published Online: 2014-3-3
Published in Print: 2014-3-31

©2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin/Boston

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