Group Seminar via Zoom: Fast programming of high-precision DACs via Beaglebone

Roman Bause, MPQ
group meeting via Videoconference (Zoom)
Tuesday, April 7th 09:00 am (MEZ)

Dealing with the unique situation of partial lock downs worldwide and home office solutions at our Institute due to the current spreading of the Covid 19 virus, we are now holding our group seminars and journal clubs via video conference.
This procedure enables us to continue our research, enhance discussions and exchange important information.

Abstract:

In our experiments, many integrated circuits like digital-analog
converters (DAC) typically require communication with a control device
in order to program them or read out data. For this communication to be
fast and reliable, microcontrollers are the ideal device to act as a
connection to our control PCs. They are, however, often difficult to
work with and severely limited in what they can do. Both of these
deficiencies can be mitigated with a Beaglebone, a small 50€-computer
which runs a Linux operating system, but also contains a microcontroller
which can access the Beaglebone's memory. This combined system can be
used for tasks that are too computationally expensive or just too
annoying to program on a microcontroller but also require fast reaction
times. Using this method, we can now program a 20-bit DAC within 15
microseconds, four orders of magnitude faster than the method we
previously used.

If you would like to join our group seminars via Zoom, please contact us for more information.