Many electron and X-ray microscopy applications place conflicting demands on detector subsystems. These applications seek to maximise detector throughput at high count-rates at the same time as minimising pulse pile-up and maintaining accurate energy resolution. Traditional approaches to digital pulse processing typically require the user to trade-off degraded energy resolution against detector dead time. System Characterisation determines the system attributes unique to the particular X-ray

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... ector and is required for accurate pulse localisation and identification. Pulse localisation is performed on the input data stream in order to accurately determine the timeof-arrival of each radiation event. Pulse identification uses the digitised detector output, the system characterisation data and the pulse localisation data to determine the energy of each pulse in the digitised X-ray detector output.