R. Pantoja¹, J. Morales¹, E. Rodríguez¹, J. León¹, F. Racedo¹, A. Bastidas¹, M. Jaramillo² and E. Solarte³

¹Optics and Laser Group; Department of Physics, Universidad del Cauca / Popayán - Colombia
²Cleaner Production Group; Pontificia Universidad Javeriana / Cali - Colombia
³Quantum Optics Group; Department of Physics, Universidad del Valle / Cali – Colombia

 

In the process of photons counting, the first step is the filtering of the PMT’s output using a discriminator in order to remove a substantial number of dark counts. A discriminator is essentially a high-speed comparator whose output changes state when the signal from the PMT exceeds a preset threshold, called the discriminator level. The second step involves using a multichannel counter, often called a multichannel scaler or MCS. A MCS has a number of memory registers that are accessed sequentially, and for a fixed time, after the MCS adds one to the number in the currently active register. In this work we report the design and assembly of a photon counter, for to be in use in Lidar systems, with a discriminator using two LH0032 and a 16-bit HCTL encoder, and a multichannel scaler using a DSP PIC18f452.