A PULSE-PATTERN GENERATOR USING LABVIEW FPGA
D. Beck, Henk Simon Brand, H. Hahn, F. Herfurth, G. Marx, L. Schweikhard, F. Ziegler · 2009
A pulse-pattern generator produces bit patterns at user specified times. It can be used to control the timing of experimental procedures - each bit is used as a trigger line for external devices like a switch-able power supply. The development was initiated by the need of ion trap facilities [1]. Typically, such a facility has about three traps. The experimental procedure requires repeating many times a complex sequence of a few seconds duration with about 30 steps with a precision of 100 ns. The sequence must be synchronized to external events like the timing structure of an accelerator. As a solution, a FPGA card from National Instruments is used. The LabVIEW FPGA module translates the graphical code to VHDL, which is processed further by the tool chain of the FPGA manufacturer Xilinx. Presently, this solution is used at six different experiments at four institutes.