A time-domain pulse amplitude and width discrimination method for photon counting

This work shows a time-domain method for the discrimination and digitization of parameters of voltage pulses coming from optical detectors, taking into account the presence of electronic noise and afterpulsing. Our scheme is based on an FPGA-based time-to-digital converter as well as an adjustable-threshold comparator complemented with commercial elements. Here, the design, implementation and optimization of a multiphase TDC using delay lines shorter than a single clock period is also described. The performance of this signal processing system is discussed through the results from the statistical code density test, statistical distributions of measurements and information gathered from an optical detector. Unlike dual voltage threshold discriminators or constant-fraction discriminators, the proposed method uses amplitude and time information to define an adjustable discrimination window that enables the acquisition of spectra.