Nuclear physics experiments use arrays of scintillators to capture the results of particle accelerator bombardment on test samples. Electrical pulses are generated to find the kind of radiation that hit the scintillator. A key requirement is to separate the pulse shapes of neutrons and gamma rays for each detection event. One approach is to sample the resultant waveform with high-speed ADCs and employ widely used DSP techniques to discriminate the pulse shapes.
Although it is effective, this existing approach leads to accurate pulse shape discrimination requires high-speed ADCs (+100 Mega Samples/sec) per channel), which are expensive. Processing the entire output stream also means most of the computation and data storage happens for all non-detection events, resulting in inefficiencies.