An FPGA-based nuclear pulse generator with a prescribed amplitude distribution

A design of a low-cost electrical pulse generator capable of producing random pulses with exponentially decaying tail as coming from a nuclear detector is described. The generator can generate periodic single or double pulses of a user-defined amplitude and decay time, or randomly occurring pulses with amplitudes drawn at random from a user-prescribed probability density function. The electronics is based on a low power consumption Spartan-6 field-programmable gate array (FPGA) and a 14-bit digital to analog converter (DAC) running at frequency of 40 MHz, and a complete technical documentation to build the generator is available online.