Specifications

Luminescence Lifetime Imaging in the Microsecond Range 35
beginning of each pixel. The pixel time is made long enough to observe the full luminescence
decay before the scanner goes to the next pixel.
Because of the low laser repetition rate the DPC-230 is best operated in the ‘Multiscaler Imag-
ing’ mode. This makes a delay in the SNC path unnecessary. Moreover, multiscaler operation
does not require any gating of the stop pulse with the previously detected photons (see Fig. 4).
Therefore, 12 LVTTL input channels (16 minus 4 for the scan clocks and the SYNC) are
available to connect detectors. An example of a system with several SPADs is shown in Fig.
54.
DPC-230 module
LVTTL
Inputs
Scan
head
Light
Laser Scanning Microscope
Detectors
DCC-100
Detector
Controller
Scan
Clock
Pulses
SYNC
from
BDL-SMC Diode Laser
in CW mode
ON/
Off
Power
CW
Pulse
Generator
SYNC
Pxl Clock
Trigger
DDG-200 card
or other
Pulse generator
SPAD
Fig. 54: Microsecond FLIM system with SPAD detectors
System parameters for a microsecond FLIM system are shown in Fig. 55. The operation mode
is ‘Multiscaler, ‘FIFO Image’. An image of 256 x 256 pixels is acquired; the acquisition runs
until the measurement is stopped by the operator. Each pixel contains 256 time channels, with
a width of 39 ns. The total time range covered is about 10 µs. The image is built up online; the
time-tag data are not saved. If you want to save the data, e.g. for running image correlation on
data acquired over many frames, activate the ‘Save .spc file’ button.
Fig. 55: DPC System parameters for microsecond FLIM
The input configuration panel is shown in Fig. 56. The configuration for a setup as shown in
Fig. 53 is shown left. The PMT is on CFD 3, the reference on CFD 4. The scan clock pulses
are connected to LVTTL 1, 2, and 3.
The input configuration panel for the setup shown in Fig. 54 is shown right. The reference is
on LVTTL 4, LVTTL 5 through LVTTL 20 record signals from SPADs.