System on Chip based compact NQR Spectrometer
Résumé
Nuclear Quadrupole Resonance (NQR) is a radio frequency spectroscopy technique providing high resolution
molecular structure analysis of solid materials containing quadrupole atomic nuclei. Despite its relatively low
sensitivity, the fact that no heavy equipment is needed to generate the spin polarization makes it potentially very
useful for low cost and portable applications. The challenges of NQR instrumentation are therefore to increase
its portability and sensitivity, and limit interference from various noises sources (e.g. radio frequency inference), in
order to perform field applications outside the laboratory. To address this challenge, we present a System on Chip
solution (SoC) integrating the major blocks of the spectrometer including: a high time resolution pulser, a fully
controllable pulse transmitter, an acquisition module, and a hardware debugger. The design of the proposed solu-
tion is verified using behavioral simulation and validated on board. While most recent compact spectrometers still
have crucial RF parts in the analog domain, our hardware and software modules are directly implemented on
the Xilinx Zynq FPGA.
Domaines
Sciences de l'ingénieur [physics]Origine | Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s) |
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