Introduction
It has been a decade since Dodonov and his colleagues [1] first announced the electrospray ionization time-of-flight mass spectrometer (ESI-TOF MS). Their initial findings have been enhanced by Standing and others [2,][ 3], and it has been recently reported that a large TOF MS system achieved a mass resolution exceeding 10,000 [4].
Encouraged by the results acquired by Dodonov and Standing, some of the MS manufactures have produced bench top ESI-TOF MS systems. However, most of these commercial models have a narrow dynamic range and are unfit to quantitative analysis because they use a TDC (Time-to-Digital Converter) as a data acquisition system. Their applications were mainly in qualitative analysis with exact mass measurement, and are limited in such fields as environmental studies and chemical dynamics that require only qualitative analysis. Because of detector saturation, these systems only show good mass acuracy when operated within a limited analyte concentration range.