DSP-Unit (STM/AFM)

The heart of the STM electronics is a DSP (TMS320C6657 with 16GFLOPS @1GHz) by Texas Instruments. It is integrated into a commercial Single Board Computer (SBC) and connects to a Windows operated PC via ethernet (1Gb/s). The DSP is electronically decoupled from the analog I/O board, which provides 6 D/A outputs (20bit, 50kHz), 4 A/D inputs (18bit, 50kHz) and 32 digital I/O ports. 4 analog output channels are used to control the piezo-voltages (x, y, z) and the sample bias voltage. One input channel records the tunneling current, the others may be used to read other signals (e.g. dI/dV from an external lock-in-amplifier).

Another analogue I/O board (clocked at 500kHz) is used to operate a PLL for qPlus sensors. It's operated by another core of the same DSP too.

Related Products

LT-STM/AFM