The Maia Spectroscopy Detector System: Engineering for Integrated Pulse Capture, Low-Latency Scanning and Real-Time Processing.

The Maia detector system is engineered for energy dispersive x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and elemental imaging at photon rates exceeding 107/s, integrated scanning of samples for pixel transit times as small as 50μs and high definition images of 108 pixels and real-time processing of detected events for spectral deconvolution and online display of pure elemental images. The system developed by CSIRO and BNL combines a planar silicon 384 detector array, application-specific integrated circuits for pulse shaping and peak detection and sampling and optical data transmission to an FPGA-based pipelined, parallel processor. This paper describes the system and the underpinning engineering solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]