NSF Award
9983345
This Small Business Innovation Research Phase II project will result in a demonstration of a self-triggered transient digitizer chip containing a flash analog-to-digital converter (ADC) and advanced triggering circuits. The self-triggering circuit designed during Phase I will be improved such that an arbitrary delay can be imposed. This will enable parts of single-shot signals occurring before the triggering point to be captured. The advanced comparator work begun in Phase I will be completed in Phase II to result in an<br/>error-correcting comparator with sub-picosecond accuracy. The resulting self-triggering transient digitizer chip will be able to trigger either by the signal itself, or an externally supplied trigger pulse. This generalization of our previous transient digitizer chip, together with the advanced architecture developed under other programs, will operate with greater than 10 GHz input bandwidth, and at a sampling rate of up to 20 GSa/s.<br/><br/>The Tektronix SCD-5000 transient digitizer provided the highest bandwidth and performance of any digitizer based on an analog-to-digital converter. The removal of this product from the market provides a significant business opportunity. Potential customers from the National Ignition Facility and the Relativistic Heavy Ion Accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory have expressed interest in our potential product.
