To use resonant scanner systems in the fields of micro-machining, microscopy or lidar applications, a sophisticated digital signal is required which meets the requirements of high-precision applications in terms of accuracy and resolution.
For this purpose, an FPGA-based electronics was designed, in order to keep the scanner in resonance, tune its frequency and determine its mirror position. The logic implemented in VHDL achieves an internal real-time resolution of about 0.5ns, which is used to generate all external trigger and synchronization signals.
External systems can be controlled by using the reference signals generated by the real-time hardware. Furthermore, user-defined data sequences can be read from the internal data memory to modulate lasers or other external components. For the configuration of the system, a desktop application was developed to configure the resonant scanner system. In addition, the software, written in C++/Qt, serves as an interface to upload process data.