Evaluation of free-running ADCs for high resolution PET data acquisition

Advances in field-programmable gate arrays (FPGA) allow a larger part of analog circuits to be replaced by digital logic. We are prototyping a high-resolution position- sensitive APD (PSAPD) based PET system, using a fully digital data acquisition system with free-running analog-to-digital converters (ADC) and FPGA logic. Numerical algorithms for digital shaping and digital timing pickup were tested and the results were compared to those …