Development of a High-Speed Digitizer to Time Resolve Nanosecond Fluorescence Pulses

The development of a high-speed digitizer system to measure time-domain voltage pulses in nanoseconds range is presented in this work. The digitizer design includes a high performance digital signal processor, a high-bandwidth analog-to-digital converter of flash-type, a set of delay lines, and a computer to achieve the time-domain measurements. A program running on the processor applies a time-equivalent sampling technique to acquire the input pulse. The processor communicates with the computer via a serial port RS-232 to receive commands and to transmit data. A control program written in LabVIEW 7.1 starts an acquisition routine in the processor. The program reads data from processor point by point in each occurrence of the signal, and plots each point to recover the time-resolved input pulse after n occurrences. The developed prototype is applied to measure fluorescence pulses from a homemade spectrometer. For this application, the LabVIEW program was improved to control the spectrometer, and to register and plot time-resolved fluorescence pulses produced by a substance. The developed digitizer has 750 MHz of analog input bandwidth, and it is able to resolve 2 ns rise-time pulses with 150 ps of resolution and a temporal error of 2.6 percent.