Feasibility study of multiplexing method using digital signal encoding technique

Radiation imaging systems consisting of a large number of channels greatly benefit from multiplexing methods to reduce the number of channels with minimizing the system complexity and development cost. In conventional pixelated radiation detector modules, such as anger logic, is used to reduce a large number of channels that transmit signals to a data acquisition system. However, these methods have limitations of electrical noise and distortion at the detector edge. To solve these problems, a multiplexing concept using a digital signal encoding technique based on a time delay method for signals from detectors was developed in this study. The digital encoding multiplexing (DEM) method was developed based on the time-over-threshold (ToT) method to provide more information including the activation time, position, and energy in one-bit line. This is the major advantage of the DEM method as compared with the traditional ToT method providing only energy information. The energy was measured and calibrated by the ToT method. The energy resolution and coincidence time resolution were observed as 16% and 2.4 ns, respectively, with DEM. The position was successfully distributed on each channel. This study demonstrated the feasibility that DEM was useful to reduce the number of detector channels.