A High Speed Microprogrammed System for Generation and Acquisition of Signals
John G. Zornig, John F. McDonald · Review of Scientific Instruments · 1973
A high speed microprogrammed system has been constructed to perform the synthesis and recording of high frequency nonrepeating pulse signals. The system can drive an analog device with arbitrarily designed waveforms and record individual pulses from several sensors in return. The present design operates at frequencies up to 1.5 MHz and can accept pulse durations of up to 16 000 samples. Accuracy is limited by the availabe ADC and computer word size and is presently 8 bits (0.3%). A primary advantage of the design is the reliance to the maximum extent on the hardware of a small general purpose computer. Very little more external hardware is required than the ADC, DAC, and multiplexer. Waveforms are read directly from and stored directly in the host computer core memory. This enables the maximum flexibility in the design of service programs for particular experiments. At present the system is used for an experiment in which a fast pulse input is to be adjusted adaptively in real time based on the measured outputs of a system.