Quantitative energy dispersive spectroscopy (EDS) x-ray microanalysis provides important information regarding the distribution of elements within a biological sample. Low elemental concentration in biological specimens require dwell times of several seconds livetime to obtain spectra with significant statistical information, especially for quantitative EDS imaging. Deadtime caused by the rejection of pulse pileup counts is a major limiting factor of x-ray collection during the acquisition of x-ray spectra. Phase I a) demonstrated the feasibility, advantages, and minimal performance requirements for pulse pileup recovery, b) described a hardware approach using state-of-the-art digital signal processing, and c) showed that the resulting decrease in rejected pulse events can save significant time and cost by increasing throughput by as much as factor of four. Phase II will advance the design, construct prototypes, and address requirements for commercial implementation. The specific goal is to make the system low-cost and retrofitable into existing EDS systems. The techniques and hardware will be broadly applicable to any scientific instrumentation which utilized pulse height analysis, such as x-ray fluorescence and gamma- ray spectroscopy, and therefore has great potential for commercialization.
