Chen, Jinghong2020-01-04May 20192019-05May 2019https://hdl.handle.net/10657/5722Positron Emission Tomography is a growing field with an increasing influence in nuclear medicine. Recent Time-of-Flight advancements have increased the cross-sectional image clarity and progression towards a miniature, silicon-based, photomultiplier has increased the resolution. As the photomultiplier size reduces, channel-count increases. Use of ASIC based Time-to-Digital converters with remote event processing is no longer viable due to the increasing cost and complexity. Instead, multichannel, FPGA based measurements with localized event processing is a must. Within this work, an FPGA based SiPM DAQ is presented with emphasis regarding the application of PET imaging. An introduction concerning PET concepts is included with a brief description of measurement techniques followed by a review of previous work with a detailed explanation of relevant methods. Next, an analysis of the problem covers specific implementation details and difficulties followed by a comparison of results to previous work. Use of a 28nm, Kintex 7 FPGA based DAQ is examined with implementation of a 32 channel, multichain averaged TDC with 15ps RMS resolution, 11ps average bin size, and less than 10ps of integral nonlinearity.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).Positron emission tomography (PET)TDCINLDNLSiPMPositron emission tomography (PET)FPGADAQKentexTime-to-Digital2020-01-04Thesisborn digital