  To test and calibrate various detectors in nuclear and high energy physics
experiments, a general purposed calibration instrument has been developed. All
information including timing, amplitude and charge of signals can be directly
obtained to calibrate detector with this instrument by amplifying and
digitizing the signal waveform. The system consists of two parts, a large
dynamic range pre-amplifier module and a high speed and high-resolution
digitization module. The pre-amplifier module based on programmable gain
amplifier and attenuator achieves gain from -26.2 dB to 24.4 dB, making it
suitable to adapt to different detectors. Taking advantage of high speed and
high-resolution analog-to-digit converter (ADC), the waveform digitization
module samples the signal after conditioning with 12 bits resolution and up to
3.6 giga hertz samples per second (GSPS). To evaluate the feature of this
instrument, an electronics testbench platform was installed and test results
showed a bandwidth from direct current (DC) to 450 MHz and the effective number
of bits (ENOB) is above 7 bits in high gain set and 5.8 bits in low gain set in
the bandwidth range, which indicated that it had broad application prospect in
detector calibration.
