Digital control of force microscope cantilevers using a field programmable gate array

TL;DR

This paper presents a digital cantilever controller for magnetic resonance force microscopy using an FPGA, enabling flexible, real-time control with adjustable filters and low-cost hardware integration.

Contribution

It introduces a novel FPGA-based digital controller with open-source software and adaptable filtering for MRFM cantilever control, enhancing flexibility and cost-effectiveness.

Findings

Controller implemented with low-cost SDR hardware

Filter coefficients adjustable during experiments

Sample rate of 500 kHz for acoustic cantilevers

Abstract

This report describes a cantilever controller for magnetic resonance force microscopy (MRFM) based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA), along with the hardware and software used to integrate the controller into an experiment. The controller is assembled from a low-cost commercially available software defined radio (SDR) device and libraries of open-source software. The controller includes a digital filter comprising two cascaded second-order sections ("biquads"), which together can implement transfer functions for optimal cantilever controllers. An appendix in this report shows how to calculate filter coefficients for an optimal controller from measured cantilever characteristics. The controller also includes an input multiplexer and adder used in calibration protocols. Filter coefficients and multiplexer settings can be set and adjusted by control software while an experiment is running. The input is sampled at 64 MHz; the sampling frequency in the filters can be divided down under software control to achieve a good match with filter characterisics. Data reported here were sampled at 500 kHz, chosen for acoustic cantilevers with resonant frequencies near 8 kHz. Inputs are digitized with 12 bits resolution, outputs with 14 bits. The experiment software is organized as a client and server to make it easy to adapt the controller to different experiments. The server encapusulates the details of controller hardware organization, connection technology, filter architecture, and number representation. The same server could be used in any experiment, while a different client encodes the particulars of each experiment.