Digital Pulse Timing in FPGAs for Positron Emission Tomography

Modern Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) are capable of performing complex digital signal processing computations with clock rates of above 100MHz. This, combined with their low cost and ease of use, make them an ideal technology for pulse timing, and are a central part of our next generation of electronics for our pre-clinical PET scanner systems. To that end, our laboratory has been developing a pulse timing technique that is based on a digital leading edge discriminator to achieve timing resolution well below the sampling period of the analog to digital converter (ADC). We report our results for timing simulations and initial FPGA implementation.