2022/10/13 by Michele Sorelli, Marco Marchetti, Sorelli, Michele +9
Engineering · #Advancements in PLL and VCO Technologies #Analog and Mixed-Signal Circuit Design #Experimental Learning in Engineering #FOS: Physical sciences #Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.07386
openalex publication_date 2022/10/13 · openalex created_date 2022/10/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/03
Radio-frequency (RF) signal generators are standard laboratory equipment and a wide-range of open-source and commercial devices exists to address their many applications. Nonetheless, only few expensive and proprietary solutions can be re-configured within a wide frequency band and triggered on a micro-second timescale. Such specifications are required for applications that use variable radio-frequencies to generate programmed mixed signals, to control processes or states and to precisely steer laser beams using acousto-optical devices, tasks often needed in industrial manufacturing, atomic and molecular physics or microscopy. Here we present an open-source low-cost Arduino-based control system that can store up to millions of commands received from a computer and then perform reliable high-speed programming of an arbitrary device under its control (DUC) via a single- or quad-wire Serial Peripheral Interface. The software architecture operates as a real-time state machine, making it easily extensible and adaptable to any DUC. Each configuration change can be triggered either externally or internally, reaching ~1 MHz rates when using a Teensy 4.1 Arduino-compatible board. Leveraging this flexible system, we developed a programmable four-channel RF signal generator, based on an Analog Devices 9959 Evaluation board, and we demonstrated its capability and validated its performance.