Waveform Recording

Waveform Recording firmware enables CAEN open-FPGA digitizers to operate as high-performance, dead-time-free digital oscilloscopes tailored for nuclear and particle physics instrumentation. The conditioned analog input is sampled by high-speed flash ADCs and continuously streamed into FPGA-managed circular buffers; upon trigger assertion, programmable time windows are frozen and transferred for readout while acquisition proceeds seamlessly in parallel buffers. This architecture allows precise capture of stochastic or burst-like events with minimal latency and deterministic timing, even when triggers occur at very short intervals or overlap in time.

Unlike conventional oscilloscopes, CAEN digitizers support independent per-channel self-triggering, global trigger logic and multi-board synchronization through distributed clocks, aligned timestamps and trigger routing. Combined with high-bandwidth interfaces (USB 3.0, 1/10 GbE, optical link) and scalable buffer management, waveform recording firmware provides a flexible infrastructure for high-rate, multi-channel experiments requiring continuous acquisition, deterministic timing and efficient offline analysis.