Hardware handholding

As others have pointed out, you need to amplify the signal from your chip before it can be used by a microcomputer or FPGA. But first, since you are not even sure how much current and/or voltage your chip is putting out, why not see if you can rent or lease test equipment that can measure really tiny voltages and currents? Only then will you know what you are dealing with and if you can use a commercial op-amp to amplify the signal, or whether you'll have to get something custom made. And to keep things simple, I would start out with a microcomputer to monitor a signal or two, rather than an FPGA.

-Dave Pollum

If it keeps raining, I'll have some lakefront property I'd like to discuss selling you...

... snip ...

However, even an MBA will probably accept the 1.5e6 dollar prize.

you can probably get a spartan3e with 100 user IOs for less than 10$

-Lasse

OK, so it probably is about DNA sequencing. This is not a novel idea, there are people working on it for a couple of years. Why not ask them, especially since they live near you?

The correct value is 6E6/s, or 6 million electrons per second.

maybe I missed the joke, but that's wrong. eV is an enery unit, 1eV is

My calc above should demonstrate that 1pA is 6 million electrons per second. Hard to measure this "current" with 100MHz bandwith.

Oliver

Yes, you are right. One electron is E-19 Amp, or E19 electrons to get one Amp one Volt. I am trying to tell the OP that the odd is E19 against him.

Oh dear. One electron is 1.6E-19 COULOMBS. One electron _per_second_ gives you 1.6E-19 amps. None of which tells you anything about the voltage.

In isolation, that's actually quite doable. Electron multipliers can easily detect individual electrons. I've used them in the past in the form of photomultipliers. 100MHz is quite fast but ISTR seeing PMTs with quoted sub-nanosecond response times. If PMTs can work at those kind of speeds then plain electron multipliers must also be able to work at those speeds.

Whilst that's all very interesting I can't see how to use it in the intended application. For an electron multiplier to work you need the electrons to be both fairly energetic and in free space

- it isn't the the kind of thing you connect up with wires. I don't think either of those parameters will be easily satisfied in the OP's app.

FYI we have been detecting single electrons with photo-multipliers for at least the past 60 years. I can personally vouch for about

I fail to see how you can describe the action of a single electron in terms of frequency. I consider that a frequency requires a wave, which in turn requires a large multiplicity of point-style objects to simulate.

To be pedantic some form of repetitive occurance, even signalling with lights using Morse Code has 'burst frequency', but the code patterns are not exactly waves in themselves. The light is (depending on whether you view the photons at that time as a wave or a particle....).

I wasn't referring to the frequency of an electron, wave/particle duality or any other area of theoretical physics, but to the the mechanics of actually counting the electrons and recording when they arrive. The current from a PMT isn't sharply defined - it has a definite rise and fall time just like anything else. While the tube itself is asynchronous in operation the same is probably not true of the surrounding circuitry. To keep that circuitry simple you want to interpret the PMT output as a simple binary signal - is there a photon/electron there or not - and the response time of the tube should be short compared to the sampling frequency to reduce the effects of what happens when an individual pulse straddles a clock transition.