The Experimental Objectives  1. To be fully acquainted with the basic operation of both single channel and multichannel analyzers including acquisition software Maestro.  2. To determine the linearity of the single channel analyzers in different modes of operation.  3. To be able to measure the intrinsic resolution of the tail pulse generator-amplifier system using the MCA.  4. To be able to determine the nonlinearity of a multichannel analyzer. Brief Theoretical Background One of the targets in signal processing is converting the processed linear signal to a digital form. It is worth noting that most storage (or memory) devices store information in digital form, that is, in 1s and 0s. Therefore, conversion is crucial in the sense that the processed information can be stored for future analysis as well as plotting the pulse height spectrum as emitted by the detector. There are two key channels or tools used to output logic pulses. The first one is known as a single channel analyzer (SCA), it outputs a logic pulse when the input pulse meets a certain amplitude. The tool that provides the means to conduct a pulse height analysis of incoming linear signals (pulse height analysis, or PHA mode) as well as conduct a series of counting experiments in one run (multichannel scaling, or MCS mode) is known as a multichannel analyzer (MCA). It is worth noting that MCA is a collection of SCAs where every individual SCA is connected to a unique counter. This interconnection of SCAs results in MCA being known as an ADC (analog-to-digital converter). There are various types of comparators, key of them being Wilkinson, flash, and sub-ranging ADC. Figure 1 below shows the flash ADC; Figure 1: Flash ADC Despite the configuration technique the ADC cannot carry out a simultaneous processing and storage of signals. There is a time-span referred to as the dead time that is usually linked with every ADC. The digital values are either on or off, there is a scale to the power of 2 for such parameter as voltage bins, number of SCAs utilized, and number of channels. Correspondingly, the number of states of the inputs will be to the power of 2. For instance, a three-input systems will have 2 3 as its possible digit values. These are as outlined below: 000 001 010 011 100 101 110 111 Also, the available commercial MCAs have their number of channels corresponding to this power 2 algorithm. As such, the key specification of commercial MCAs is the number of bits. For example, a 12 bit MCA will have 2 12 bins or 4,096 channels across its voltage range. If this range is 0-10 V, which is common for NIM, then the voltage range per channel will be 2.44 mV. From the experiment’s perspective, the radiation being measured as well as the resolution of a given SCA or MCA will influence the number of channels to be utilized. However, the conversion process via the ADCs is not always perfect as there are deviations occurring across the given input voltage range. These are referred to as non-linear effects and they are significant at the tail end of the scale, as figure 2 depicts. The vital specification of MCAs is their degree of nonlinearity. This measure always dictates the quality of the