Development of low-cost digital gamma spectrometer using ARM Cortex-M Type Microcontroller Unit

Abstract

Recently, digital gamma spectrometers have replaced analog ones due to their durability, flexibility, and compact size. The main part of the digital gamma spectrometer is the digital pulse processing (DPP) unit. The implementation of the DPP unit using the ARM Cortex-M-based microcontroller units is a recent attractive approach. This originates from their advanced features and low cost. In this paper, we propose an implementation of the DPP unit using the ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontroller unit. The targeted detector with this implementation is the sodium iodide detector. However, this implementation is based on less than 2 MS/s sampling rate, it is guaranteed experimentally to cope with input count rates up to 47 kC/s. This results from our specific proposed methodology for extracting pulse height from the trapezoidal-shaped pulses.