Gamma spectrometer is not available in many laboratories because it is very expensive. Analog to digital converter ADC is the basic component of digital gamma spectrometers. The sampling rate of the ADC plays an important role in determining the performance and the cost of the gamma spectrometers. This paper investigates experimentally the ADC's sampling rate effect on the performance of the gamma spectroscopy. The conducted experiment started by sampling a real pre-amplifier output. Then, the acquired samples have been processed at different sampling rates to build the dedicated gamma spectrums. During the processing of the sampled signals, three different digital filters have been tested to distinguish their effect on the energy resolution when the sampling rate is reduced. The results of this experimental investigation will help later in proposing new low-cost and efficient gamma spectrometer prototypes.

Recently, digital gamma spectrometers have replaced analog ones due to their durability, flexibility, and compact size. The main part of the digital gamma spectrometer is the digital pulse processing (DPP) unit. The implementation of the DPP unit using the ARM Cortex-M-based microcontroller units is a recent attractive approach. This originates from their advanced features and low cost. In this paper, we propose an implementation of the DPP unit using the ARM Cortex-M3-based microcontroller unit. The targeted detector with this implementation is the sodium iodide detector. However, this implementation is based on less than 2 MS/s sampling rate, it is guaranteed experimentally to cope with input count rates up to 47 kC/s. This results from our specific proposed methodology for extracting pulse height from the trapezoidal-shaped pulses.

This paper presents a new design of a very low cost two-channel type K thermocouple interface circuit for micro-controllers. This interface circuit targets accurate temperature measurements for nuclear research instrumentation from 0 up to 250 degree Celsius with 1 degree resolution. The usage of the computational capabilities of a micro-controller is proposed to make an adaptive self calibration for the designed interface circuit. Also, these computational capabilities are used to solve the two major problems associated with thermocouples, namely the thermocouple non-linearity problems and the offset errors resulting from the thermocouple reference junctions.

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