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New MCS6 Firmware

A new firmware is available that makes the MCS6 equivalent to a MCS6A with firmware version 15.12. After the upgrade the MCS6 must be operated with the MCS6A software. The upgrade must be done with a programmer and is not cost-free. Contact your vendor if you are interested to upgrade.

Improvements of new firmware:

- End-of-sweep deadtime only 96 ns compared with 190 ns

- The maximum count rate to fill the FIFO is 100 MHz instead of 33 MHz.

- Lost counts problem fixed

- The USB packet size is 512 bytes instead of 1024 bytes and complies with the USB standard. Therefore after the upgrade the MCS6 can be operated under Linux without problems using the MCS6A software. The Linux software uses the libusb-1.0 package, no driver is necessary.

- The zero events are inserted with constant rate.
The old MCS6 also has zero events that are inserted to assure a permanent data flow at low counting rates, but not with a fixed rate. The benefit of the zero events with fixed rate is that the real time is in the list data. So you can reconstruct the realtime from a list file, also when evaluating only a part of the list file. Independent from the count rate, every 2^18 * 5 ns i.e. 1.311 msec a zero data word is inserted into the list data stream. The number of zero events is available in Status[0].cnt[7]. It is accessible by the DLL. The realtime of the acquisition in seconds is the number of zero events / 762.94.