In 2008, DEK Technologies worked with an Australian company to improve a Gamma Ray Spectroscopy system. Accurate, real time measurement of radiation can be utilized in a number of industries (medical, defense, security and mining being some examples). The technique allows non-invasive characterization of materials.

A common problem with previously existing systems is that the system will be overloaded with radiation events. A novel signal processing algorithm had been developed to reduce this problem and this was further enhanced by DEK’s work to implement this algorithm in hardware.

DEK Technologies performed FPGA, GUI and MATLAB design work within this project.

The original implementation of the algorithm was in MATLAB software, which required data acquisition followed by post processing. DEK implemented an FPGA version of the algorithm, which enabled orders of magnitude speedup and also real time operation. DEK created our own library of floating point adders, multipliers and dividers which had much better performance than the library available from the FPGA vendor. DEK also performed system testing and participated in GUI implementation.