A programmable readout system for 3He/BF3 neutron detectors

Abstract CAEN SpA has developed a 19″ rack-mount solution for the readout of 3 He/BF 3 tubes. It is a scalable system allowing the user to put together few to hundreds neutron detectors. It is composed of a CAEN R803x high voltage board, CAEN R1443 preamplifier specifically designed to work at best with 3 He/BF 3 tubes and CAEN R5560 14-bit 125 MS/s open FPGA digitizer. Thanks to its firmware programmability, this readout system can perform specific filtering to achieve the best charge, timing and position measurements. CAEN provides a DAQ software to remotely manage the system and acquire waveforms, energy, ToF spectra and perform position reconstruction. Moreover, the R5560 offers the possibility to use SCI-Compiler, a block-diagram-based software which allows to easily implement custom pulse processing algorithms in the board FPGA.