Pulse-amplitude discriminators are useful in nuclear counting to separate signals of greater amplitude from a background of unwanted or noise signals of lesser amplitude. As used here, the term "fast" implies circuits capable of responding to pulses between a nanosecond and a microsecond in duration. An ideal discriminator would produce for any incoming signal whose amplitude is greater than a threshold bias level, an output pulse of constant amplitude, duration, and delay with respect to the input signal, regardless of the incoming duration and rate; and for signals less than the threshold, zero output.