I am new to this forum. I have ordered a DRS4 evaluation board for doing experiments with very fast PET detectors. It has not arrived yet. The version of the manual I downloaded today shows software  installation instructions for Windows 7 and earlier versions. I intend to use it on a 64bit PC running Windows 8.1. Will the Windows 7 driver work, or is there an updated version for Windows 8 or 10?

Have a look here elog:434

I tried this suggestion of changing the startup settings to ingore driver license signing (as suggested in the post # 434), but when I tried to install the software I got a error message which I captured from the screen and I have attached. Perhaps I have the wrong version, or, as suggested, the file I downloaded from your site is incomplete?

I tried restarting Windows 10 in a way the allowed me to use "advanced startup options" Option 7 suggested it was to restart without mandatory driver signing. However, the error persists. Has anyone tested this latest version 5.0.4 on Windows 10? My hardware arrived today, and I am anxious to test it.!!!!

On a hunch, I tried downloading V 5.0.3 instead. This works, and I now have the oscilloscope mode displaying signals! (just to make sure, I re-tire version 5.0.4 and still get the same error. So, in summary V 5.0.3 seems to install successfully and work with Windows 10, but the newer V5.0.4 does not install... I assmume that I am missing something though, as the newer version is 10 Mbytes bigger!

The 5.0.4 version was corrupt on our server. I fixed it, so now it shoudl also work fine (although there are only very minor changes between 5.0.3 and 5.0.4).

/Stefan

Hello,

I have designed four DRS4 chips (36 channels) on my board running at 1GHz (REFCLK=488.28KHz) and ROI mode. All 4 chips' REFCLK, DWRITE, RSRLOAD, and SRCLK are buffer driven by the same source.  SRCLK is set to 40MHz to reduce the readout time.

If I injected a sine waveform, buffered and splitted into all 36 channels,I noticed all 9 channels on each DRS4 chip output almost the same as expected.  But the output phase from chip to chip is drifting as shown in attached picture which is from two different channels of different chips.  From the few boards I have built, I found few chips are drifting more than the others and is different on every board.

The sympton look like the DRS4 internal PLL is drifting, but I checked the DTAP output on every chip and found it's dead-lock steady even I used persistance setting on my oscilloscope.  Do you have any suggestion how to attack this problem?  Thank you.

Jacob Hwang
 

Hi Jacob,

you are missing the timing calibration. Each sampling cell has not the same width. Running at 5 GSPS, cell widths scatter from 150 ps to 250 ps. If you integrate these widhts, you get a time scale which can be off by a few ns between chips, something you see in your plot. Here is a paper which explains in detail how to do a timing calibration: https://arxiv.org/abs/1405.4975

Cheers,
Stefan

Dear DRS4 team,

On page 3 of the data sheet, Table 1. for readout speed a typical value of 10 MHz is specified, but in the comment column it notes optimal performance achieved at 33 MHz.

I see the V5.1 eval board runs at 16 MHz. I'd like to understand the rationale for this using speed, instead of 33 MHz. Is there an SNR issue for the ADC at the higher speed, even though this is optimal for the DRS4?

Very best,

Sean

The analog output of the DRS4 chip needs some time to settle. In principle it need an infinite amout of time (exponential curve) to settle to 100% of the final value. So if we sample after a finite time, there is some error we do. Some of the error will be taken care of the voltage calibration, but there remains some residual error depending on the value of the previous sampling cell. So all sampling speeds 10 MHz, 16 MHz, 33 MHz are kind of rule of thumbs. In the end we run the evaluation board at 16 MHz to save a little bit of power (which is limited on an USB device). But I never made a careful study of noise-after-calibration vs. sampling speed. If you have some measurements, I'm happt to include it in the data sheet.

Stefan

 Are there any plans to include reconstruction of nonuniform sampling  in DRS4 to get uniformly sampled data?

Im now reading article IEEE Trans on Circ. ans Systems I, Vol.55 No.8 sept. 2008 Reconstruction of Nonuniformly Sampled Bandlimited Signals Usinga Differentiator–Multiplier Cascade by Stefan Tertinek and Christian Vogel

and plan to implement it, but may be somebody has it done before me.

Interesting paper. I was not aware of this method. Sounds interesting. AFAIK, nobody has implemented it so far.

My (old) plan was to linearly interpolate samples (something you could do in an FPGA as well), but this will introduce (small) errors. The next best thing would be to do some spline interpolation, but this is time consuming and not suited for an FPGA.

If you get good results with the method above, please let others know about it.

/Stefan 

Greetings, 

I have adapted the drs_exam.cpp to allow for a user input number of channels and trigger levels.

The program mostly works well, however there are counts which form a noise peak, imposed on the regular channel response.

To illustrate, I acquired 10,000 counts (measuring peak to peak) with the drsosc, and with my adapted script, with two channels and OR trigger logic.

Is there something missing in my code that could explain the cause of this noise peak? I have attached the .cpp file.

Many thanks,

Justin

A new software version 5.0.5 has been released today. This fixes a few bugs in multi-board configurations, and adds saving of the scaler values into XML and binary files. Please note that the binary file format has been changed for that. The new format is described in an updated manual (page 25), and reflected in a new read_binary.cpp program contained in the distribution.

/Stefan

Hello everybody,

I get often asked if the DRS4 evaluation board can accomodate negative input pulses going to -1V. This is unfortunately not possible, since the board is mainly for evaluation of the DRS4 chip and should not be seen as a complete oscilloscope with flexible input stage. So the maximum it can do is -0.5V to +0.5V or 0V to 1V. For -1V signals, one can use however a passive inverter like this one:

http://www.phillipsscientific.com/pdf/460ds.pdf

And for signals going furhter (-2V, -10V) one can use a passive attenuator like this one:

http://www.pomonaelectronics.com/pdf/d4108_K5513_101.pdf

Best regards,

Stefan

Hello Stefan,

I am using four DRS4 v5 eval boards to digitize 16 channels of data. I have recently changed from saving the timing information of the waveform using GetTime() to GetTimeCalibration(). When changing over, I noticed that some values for fCellDT for cell 498 are negative. Over the 16 channels used, 4 of them have negative time bin widths for cell 498 while the other 12 channels are very close to 0 (in the ~10 ps range). One of the eval boards has no negative fCellDT whereas the other three boards have one or two channels with negative values.

Upon further inspection, I checked the time between samples of GetTime() and found the same results in cell 498. After finding this, I did a timing calibration again with CalibrateTiming() even though in a different post on the discussion forum you said it was valid for a wide range of temperatures and a long time (years). This still allowed the negative fCellDT values to persist.

Is this a common occurance? If so, is there a method to fix this issue? Is there a reason for cell 498 to have a small value for fCellDT? I searched the discussion forum and did not find anything relating to this issue.

Attached are a couple waveform traces using GetTime() zoomed in on cell 498.

Thanks,

Kyle Weinfurther

Hi Kyle,

If I remember right the negative sampling width happens only for 498 and at high sampling speeds. It is described in a paper from Stefan:

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1405.4975.pdf

or

“Novel Calibration Method for Switched Capacitor Arrays Enables Time Measurements With Sub-Picosecond Resolution”( IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science 61 (2014),Nr. 6, 3607–3617)

I just realized that the negative bin widht is not explicitly mentioned in the quoted paper. So let me explain it here:

The negative value of cell 498 is correct and "real" in the sense that the signal is first captured in cell 498 and later in cell 497. This is due to the exact layout of the cells on the chip and the input signal. Cell 498 is simply much closer to the input, so sees the signal earlier than cell 497, even if it's triggerd after cell 497. So nothing to worry about.

Stefan

I am using a DRS4 Evaluation Board v5 and running the drsosc.exe version 5.06 on a Window 7 machine. I have performed the voltage and timing calibration.

With test pulses on channel 1 and 2, I collected binary data file with all 4 channels active sampling at 5GSPS. 

Attached is a distribution of the bin_width vs. cell # for all the 4 channels. Note that there are few cells with bin_width < 10 ps. 

Channel 1: bin_width[498] = -0.000348, bin_width[1010]= -0.000348

Channel 2: bin_width[498] = 0.007363

Channel 3: bin_width[498] = 0.007843

Channel 4: bin_width[498] = 0.005948

Is this normal? How can you get negative bin_width? What does negative bin_width means?

I have attached the binary data file for your verification.

Yes that's normal. A negative cell bin width means that the next cell N+1 samples the input signal before cell N. This can happen due to the signal routing on the DRS4 chip.

Stefan