Radiation-hard parallel readout circuit for low-frequency voltage signal measurements

Dat Tran; Nicolas Gorius; Daniel Glavin; Gerard Quilligan; Meredith Wieber; Stephen A. McKim; Shahid Aslam; George Nehmetallah

doi:10.1117/12.2558117

23 April 2020 Radiation-hard parallel readout circuit for low-frequency voltage signal measurements

Dat Tran, Nicolas Gorius, Daniel Glavin, Gerard Quilligan, Meredith Wieber, Stephen A. McKim, Shahid Aslam, George Nehmetallah

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 11422, Sensors and Systems for Space Applications XIII; 1142205 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2558117
Event: SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing, 2020, Online Only

Abstract

NASA Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC) has successfully developed and tested a custom-designed low-noise multi-channel digitizer (MCD) application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for operation in harsh radiation environments. The MCD-ASIC is optimized for low-frequency and low-voltage signal measurements from sensors and transducers. It has 20 input channels where each channel is comprised of auto-zeroed chopper variable-gain amplifier, post amplifier, and a second order ΣΔ modulator. ΣΔ analog-to-digital converter (ADC) relies on oversampling and noise shaping to achieve high-resolution conversion. However, the MCD-ASIC requires digital filtering and decimation to convert the output single bit streams from the ADC to useful data words. A parallel digital platform such as a field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA) is highly suitable to fully leverage the capabilities of the MCD-ASIC. The FPGA controls the MCD-ASIC via serial peripheral interface (SPI) protocol and acquires data from it. A Python-script communicates with the FPGA board through a USB interface on a cross operating platform. Using this architecture, the system is capable of monitoring up to 20 voltage readout channels simultaneously in a real-time manner. Each channel’s parameters can be programmed independently allowing maximum user versatility. In this paper, we present analysis of the analog front-end, the implementation of the digital processing unit on the FPGA, and provide noise performance results from the MCD-ASIC readout.

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Citation Download Citation

Dat Tran, Nicolas Gorius, Daniel Glavin, Gerard Quilligan, Meredith Wieber, Stephen A. McKim, Shahid Aslam, and George Nehmetallah "Radiation-hard parallel readout circuit for low-frequency voltage signal measurements", Proc. SPIE 11422, Sensors and Systems for Space Applications XIII, 1142205 (23 April 2020); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2558117

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