Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.v.

National Semiconductor Corporation

Tuvia Liran

Aviv Marks

Roland Proksa

Ewald Roessl

Jens-Peter Schlomka

A particle-counting apparatus is described, which reduces a resulting width of pulses when a charge pulse is received from a particle detector, thereby reducing pile-up problems with pulses. Pulse shortening is obtained by resetting the pulse shortly after it exceeds its peak level at the apparatus output. The apparatus includes a charge-sensitive amplifier and a shaper which generates an output for subsequent discrimination circuits. A reset generator monitors the shaper output and generates a reset signal to the shaper when a peak has been detected.

Particle-counting apparatus with pulse shortening

An apparatus includes a local minimum identifier () that identifies a local minimum between overlapping pulses in a signal, wherein the pulses have amplitudes that are indicative of the energy of successively detected photons from a multi-energetic radiation beam by a radiation sensitive detector, and a pulse pile-up error corrector () that corrects, based on the local minimum, for a pulse pile-up energy-discrimination error when energy-discriminating the pulses using at least two thresholds corresponding to different energy levels. This technique may reduce spectral error when counting photons at a high count rate.

Digital pulse processing for multi-spectral photon counting readout circuits

A substrate bias generator of the type that includes a driver for providing an AC signal to a charge pump node, a first switch coupled between the charge pump node and ground such that charge is pumped from the charge pump node to ground when the voltage at the charge pump node is near its peak, and a second switch coupled between the charge pump node and the substrate such that charge is pumped to the charge pump node from the substrate when the voltage at the charge pump node is near its most negative value. A unidirectional switch is provided between the first switch and ground to prevent charge from flowing from ground to the charge pump node when the second switch is open.

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Tuvia Liran