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Pyramid News

At Pyramid we are constantly developing our range of products and services. Watch this page for information on new products, product applications and software releases. You can access older news items by clicking the links on the left-hand side.


We're growing - more space in our Lexington offices

Lexington, MA (January 02, 2012)-

Our offices in Lexington MA are in a great location, with convenient travel to many of our US customers, but it was getting to be a squeeze. So when the place next door became available, we took the opportunity to double our space and improve our operations.

Reception

A new clean manufacturing test area has been set up for our range of electronics and beamline instrumentation. The old manufacturing area is now dedicated for engineering development. Full segregation between production inventory and engineering materials is possible now. Please call by!

CP10 - a range of fast pre-amplifiers

Lexington, MA (April 04, 2011)-

The new C400 high-performance pulse counting detector controller is joined by two fast pre-amplifiers, the CP10-A and CP10-B. These pre-amplifiers are very compact, making them well-suited to detector arrays where space is at a premium. The C400 provides the power for the CP10, and accepts the amplified signal.

CP10

The CP10-A is optimized for use with fast inorganic scintillators like LaCl3, LaBr3 and YAP. The higher bandwidth CP10-B is intended for use with pulse-counting electron multipliers, channel plates and high-gain avalanche photodiode systems such as silicon photomultipliers.

CP10 response

These individual scintillation events from a LaCl3 detector illustrate the response of the two pre-amplifiers. The CP10-B on the right shows the individual avalanche structure of the event, but although this is interesting, it's not what you want for reliable pulse counting, so the CP10-A is the correct choice for this detector.

LaCl3_CP10ALaCl3_CP10B

C400 - an integrated pulse counting solution

Lexington, MA (December 01, 2010) -

The new C400 G2-series device provides all the services you need for high speed detector pulse counting in a single unit. Four independent high speed window discriminator channels are accompanied by four high voltage supplies, preamplifier power outputs, diagnostic LED pulser drives and pulse monitor outputs. The C400 is particularly suited to the new generation of fast scintillator/photomultiplier detectors, such as those with LaCl3 and LaBr3crystals, but is also able to handle NaI scintillators and avalanche photodiodes. The scalers can handle continuous rates up to 100 MHz, and fast on-board memory allows contiguous data with fine time-slicing. An automated discriminator sweep facility allows you to determine quickly the spectrum of pulse heights, and thus set up the detector high voltage and the upper and lower discriminator levels for best performance.

The C400 was developed in response to a requirement from FMB-Oxford (www.fmb-oxford.com) for synchrotron beamline diffraction detector electronics. Because this application can require clusters of fast photon-counting detectors operating in parallel, the C400 has trigger distrinution features to allow multiple units to operate in synchronization. It also includes a dedicated input for a position encoder, so that measured counts can be correlated directly with the position of a goniometer or similar motion device.

The C400 includes Ethernet, fiber optic and RS-232 / RS-485 interfaces. A fully-featured diagnostic host program is supplied which allows you to gather, display and log data, and control all the features of the device.

Pyramid Supports the Growth of Particle Therapy

Lexington, MA (September 2010) -

Pyramid is an active supplier and collaborator in the field of particle therapy, a technique which is growing rapidly, with new facilities being built and commissioned around the world. We work with the leading suppliers of particle therapy systems from across the world

(Heidelberg Ion-Beam Therapy Center)

Particle therapy is an important tool in the fight against cancer. Beams of protons or heavier ions such as carbon 6+ are delivered to a precisely defined tumor volume in the patient's body. The ionizing radiation kills the cancer cells, and the particular energy deposition characteristic of the ions in the body means that healthy tissue is spared to a much greater extent than with the well-established X-ray therapy techniques. You can read an introduction to particle therapy by John Gordon published in the August 2010 issue of Physics World, or view it on-line here.

We are pleased in particular to be working with Dr Jay Flanz and his colleagues at the Francis H Burr Proton Therapy Center at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). This center is one of the leading sites in the world for the use and advancement of the technique. Pyramid developed and installed beam measurement and scan control systems at MGH to enable pencil-beam scanning treatments.

Pyramid brings its expertise with realtime systems, beamline diagnostics and beam scan control to particle therapy. We would be pleased to discuss your needs in any of the following particle beam technology areas:

Flat Field Feature for the I13200

Lexington, MA (June, 2010) -

The I3200 thirty-two channel electrometer is often used to read out a multi-segment detector such as a strip ionization chamber or diode array. The internal calibration function of the I3200 ensures that all the channels are equal in the sense that they all measure current identically. However a typical multi-element detector does not have completely equal sensitivity (expressed as current or charge out per unit input). This is often compensated by the process of "flat-fielding". You apply an equal stimulus to all of the sensors, and derive the factors that give a flat response.

Our customer at the University of Heidelberg requested that this facility be added to the PSI Diagnostic software. It is now available to all customers in version 4.62, which is available on the downloads page (here).

The software stores a compensation offset and gain factor for each channel, which are associated with a particular unit serial number. To measure the offsets, you simply ensure that the stimulus signal is absent, but that a representative background is present, and click the offsets button. Enter the value of the stimulus signal, which can be in any units you like, then apply the uniform flat field stimulus and click the gains button. The factors are calculated and stored.

The compensated values are accessed via a new "Comp" unit selection on the Data screen. In the following example, the first screenshot shows a flat field stimulus measured in absolute current units, in the normal way. The stimulus was used for a compensation calibration, and the second screenshot shows how it then appears when measured in compensated units. The response is flat, as required.

Announcing the F3200E 32-channel High Speed Current Digitizer

Lexington, MA (May 2010) -

Pyramid Technical Consultants is pleased to announce the launch of a major new product, the start of an enhanced range of products. The F3200E provides 32 channels of fully parallel current to voltage conversion and fully parallel 1 Mb/s digitization in a compact 1U 19" chassis. Currents in the range 0.1 nA to 10 mA are handled by mult-range I-V converter circuits. The analog bandwidth is up to 250 kHz. On-board FPGAs provide real-time filtering and data buffering to permit a range of measurements with good time resolution across multiple channels. Applications include time-resolved data acquisition from systems where a beam position is scanned, or beam energy is swept in a periodic manner.

he F3200E can be triggered by the external sweep generator, or it can trigger the source itself. Data averaging schemes include block averaging of the incoming data for bandwidth narrowing, and averaging across multiple triggers in the manner of digital oscillscope waveform averaging. Even before averaging, the unloaded noise levels are less than 0.1% of full scale on each current range at 1 MSa/s conversion rate. The following plot shows RMS noise as a fraction of full scale, measured for the four current ranges, as a function of the number of ADC conversions averaged into each reading.

The F3200E is the first member of the enhanced G2 range of Pyramid products. It is compatible with the existing product line, including the A500 real-time loop controller, but adds significant on-board capability including an Ethernet interface, extended memory for data buffering and fully uploadable firmware. The Diagnostic host software is built on a RPC function library that is also available to customers who wish to create their own software.

Asked to comment on the F3200E, company president Dr Paul Boisseau would probably say "We are proud of the F3200E. It combines significant advances in analog and digital performance with a flexible, open software system. We expect that our customers will see features in their data, perhaps for the first time, that increase their understanding of their data and processes. That is the path to better results." Please look at the Products page here for further details of the F3200E.