Anticoincidence Circuit

in technology, an inhibitor, an electronic device that acts to isolate one of a certain group of events (the advent of electrical pulses, ionized particles, and others) on the basis that it occurs non-contemporaneously with others in a prescribed time interval. In order for an anticoincidence circuit to operate reliably, the inhibiting signal must act with a certain lead time which takes the anticoincidence circuit reaction into account so as to ensure the conditions needed for reliably inhibiting pulses arriving at the signal inputs. Anticoincidence circuits are employed widely as digital computer elements; in amplitude analyzers, discriminators, and translators and decoding devices; for physical investigations; and so on. The most widely used anticoincidence circuits are the diode-potentiometer and the diode-transformer types implemented with multigrid electron tubes or transistors; these circuits have various numbers of inputs but only one output. An anticoincidence circuit with two imputs realizes the elementary logic function X₁ • X ₂. An anticoincidence circuit is characterized primarily by the number of inputs and the time resolution—that is, by the ability to separate events occurring in short time intervals (down to 10 nanoseconds).