Scanning Probe Microscope Control : New Electronic Concept for Utmost SPM Demands
✍ Scribed by Peter Spizig
- Publisher
- Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
- Year
- 2007
- Weight
- 775 KB
- Volume
- 9
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 1439-4243
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Controlling the latest Scanning Probe Microscopes (SPMs) demand highly sophisticated electronics. This is apparent when considering even relatively simple operational procedures such as the tip approach of an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM): The controller must lower the tip towards the sample surface while at the same time it must ensure that the tip does not crash into the sample.
processing time, which -as a consequence -affects all other processes.
To overcome these drawbacks and to achieve the best possible results with extremely low noise levels, we have introduced a completely new approach to controlling SPMs with the WITec alphaControl (fig. 1).
It uses a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to implement the SPM controller and all digital controlling tasks, providing unrivalled data processing speed by computing all SPM control tasks in parallel within a single chip.