High-Speed Data Acquisition System for Nanoscale Imaging

This technical report is the product of a senior design project in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and was written in conformance with the ECE senior design final report requirements. Current scanning probe microscopy systems are often limited by the speed and resultion at which they sample. In this technical report, we demonstrate a novel data acquisition, processing, and visualization system that leverages machine learning to collect and analyze data from an extant scanning probe microscope at 4 MS/s. The system comprises four subsystems: a current preamplifier, a data acquisition system, a data processing and visualization module, and an interactive graphic user interface. The current preamplifier amplifies small currents on the order of nanoamps to voltages readable by the data acquisition system. The data acquisition system takes in input data from the scanning probe microscope and stores them into usable file formats for the data processing module. The data processing module uses various software signal processing techniques to analyze and visualize the data. Finally, the graphic user interface acts as the main user control system, initiating data collection and viewing collected data on user command. Future work on this system includes system-wide testing as well as optimizing the robustness of each subsystem to meet the constraints of the scanning probe microscope system.