Real-time compression of streaming X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy area-detector data

We present a data acquisition system to perform on-the-fly background subtraction and lower-level discrimination compression of streaming X-ray photon correlation spectroscopy (XPCS) data from a fast charge-coupled device area detector. The system is built using a commercial frame grabber with an on-board field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The system is capable of continuously processing 60 CCD frames per second each consisting of 1024 x 1024 pixels with up to 64 512 photon hits per frame. (C) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.