FPGA-based digitizer for BGO-based time-of-flight PET

We present a novel field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based bismuth germanate (BGO) time-of-flight (TOF) digitizer, implemented on an FPGA (XC7VX485T-2FFG1761C, Xilinx). This digitizer is designed to address the recently highlighted characteristics of BGO, which generates both scintillation and prompt Cerenkov photons when a 511 keV photon interacts with BGO. The developed digitizer independently processes these two types of photons for precise energy and timing measurements. The digitizer incorporates a noise-resistant binary counter that measures energy signals using the time-over-threshold (TOT) method. For timing measurements, we employ an embedded dual-side monitoring time-to-digital converter, which efficiently captures timing information while maintaining low resource usage. We validated the efficacy of our FPGA-based TOF digitizer through extensive experiments, including both electrical testing and coincidence measurements using BGO pixels. Our evaluations of TOT energy and timing performance utilized two 3 × 3 × 20 mm³BGO pixels coupled to CHK-HD MT silicon photomultipliers. The digitizer achieved a coincidence timing resolution (CTR) of 407 ps full width at half maximum (FWHM) for events within the full width at tenth maximum of the photopeak in the measured TOT energy spectrum. Notably, when measured with an oscilloscope, the same detector pair exhibited a CTR of 403 ps FWHM, confirming that the performance of the developed digitizer is comparable to that of an oscilloscope. With its low resource usage, our design offers significant potential for scalability, making it particularly promising for multi-channel BGO-based PET systems.