Data acquisition and processing platform in the real-time distance measurement system with dual-comb lasers

Abstract

The real-time distance measurement system with dual femtosecond comb lasers combines time-of–flight and interferometric measurement. It has advantages of wide-range, high-accuracy and fast speed at the rate about 10000 pts/s. Such a distance measurement system needs dedicated higher performance of the data acquisition and processing hardware platform to support. This paper introduces the dedicated platform of the developed absolute distance measurement system. This platform is divided into three parts according to their respective functions. First part is the data acquisition module, which function is mainly to realize the A/D conversion. In this part we designed a sampling clock adjustment module to assist the A/D conversion module to sample accurately. The sampling clock adjustment module accept a 250MHz maximum reference clock input, which from the same femtosecond laser source as the optical measurement system, then generate an output clock for the A/D converter that can be delayed up to 20ns with a resolution of 714ps. This data acquisition module can convert the analog laser pulse signal to digital signal with a 14 bits resolution and a 250 MSPS maximum sample rate. Second is the data processing and storage module consists of FPGA and DDR3 modules. The FPGA module calculates the test distance by the 16 bits digital sampling signal from the front data acquisition module. The DDR3 module implements sampling data caching. Finally part is the data transmission and peripheral interfaces module based on three DB9 and USB2.0. We can easily debug the platform in the PC and implement communication with upper machine. We tested our system used dedicate test bench in real-time. The scope of the measurement system range is 0 to 3 meters and the measurement deviation is less than 10um.