A Compact Gated Integrator for Conditioning Pulsed Analog Signals

An extremely compact gated integrator prototype has been realized and preliminarily characterized. Front-end section of the circuit is based on the high precision integrator IVC102, whereas the analog to digital conversion and data-acquisition, as well as the timing control, are performed by an LCP845 microcontroller. The system synchronizes signal detection with an external trigger generated in coincidence with the source pulse, i.e. the gated integrator amplifies the signal only when a pulse is generated, increasing significantly the signal-to-noise ratio. As a consequence, the proposed circuitry would represent an affordable, sensitive, and cost-effective alternative to the continuous-time regime measurement-technique largely adopted, for example, in radiation dosimetry.