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We report the development of an instrumentation and control system instantiated on a microprocessorfield programmable gate array (FPGA) device for a harmonic oscillator comprising a portion of a magnetic resonance force microscope. The specific advantages of the system are that it minimizes computation, increases maintainability, and reduces the technical barrier required to enter the experimental field of magnetic resonance force microscopy. Heterodyne digital control and measurement yields computational advantages. A single microprocessor-FPGA device improves system maintainability by using a single programming language. The system presented requires significantly less technical expertise to instantiate than the instrumentation of previous systems, yet integrity of performance is retained and demonstrated with experimental data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This report describes a cantilever controller for magnetic resonance force microscopy based on a field programmable gate array, along with the hardware and software used to integrate the controller into an experiment. The controller is assembled from a low-cost commercially available software defined radio device and libraries of open-source software. The controller includes a digital filter comprising two cascaded second-order sections (“biquads”), which together can implement transfer functions for optimal cantilever controllers. An appendix in this report shows how to calculate filter coefficients for an optimal controller from measured cantilever characteristics. The controller also includes an input multiplexer and adder used in calibration protocols. Filter coefficients and multiplexer settings can be set and adjusted by control software while an experiment is running. The input is sampled at 64 MHz; the sampling frequency in the filters can be divided down under software control to achieve a good match with filter characteristics. Data reported here were sampled at 500 kHz, chosen for acoustic cantilevers with resonant frequencies near 8 kHz. Inputs are digitized with 12 bit resolution, and outputs are digitized with 14 bits. The experiment software is organized as a client and server to make it easy to adapt the controller to different experiments. The server encapsulates the details of controller hardware organization, connection technology, filter architecture, and number representation. The same server could be used in any experiment, while a different client encodes the particulars of each experiment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]