Development of a low-cost digital gamma spectrometer using an STM32F4 microcontroller

Abstract

The digital pulse processing unit is the main part of a digital gamma spectrometer. There has been recent interest in implementing this unit using microcontroller chips rather than FPGA chips. In this paper, we aim to implement a digital pulse processing unit using a Cortex-M4-based microcontroller. The Cortex-M4 microprocessor features DSP capabilities. The proposed design is tested using a sodium iodide detector. It achieves acceptable energy resolution at moderate input count rates. The proposed design in this paper achieves a four times higher throughput than the throughput achieved by our previously proposed Cortex-M3-based design.