Improvement of energy spectrum characteristics of CdZnTe semiconductor detector with a digital–analog fusion method

Abstract We present a new application of a `Fusion Method’ to improve gamma-ray energy spectrum characteristics of a CdZnTe semiconductor detector. A digital and an analog system are simultaneously applied for the detector output; The digital system digitizes the signal pulse shapes for pattern recognition based on a neural network algorithm. The analog measures the signal pulse heights with a conventional analog system. The digital and the analog output data are fused and then used for improvement of the energy spectrum characteristics, i.e. the photopeak area, the peak-to-valley ratio, and the FWHM of photopeaks.