Design and development of low cost eight channel arbitrary waveform generator for laser beam modulation

We present the design and development of an eight channel arbitrary waveform generator tailored to the voltage-control of RF drivers for acousto-optical modulators, controllers for electro-optical modulators, and similar devices. Our device uses four 600 MHz ARM Cortex-M7 microcontrollers controlling eight 12-bit DACs via SPI. Minimum pulse duration is approximately 1 microsecond. The limitations of onboard memory and processing power in the microcontrollers are overcome by the design of separate software that runs on a connected computer, facilitates the calculation of sequential DAC outputs required to closely approximate a given expression of voltage as a function of time, and provides an easily navigated graphical interface for creating output routines containing a theoretically unlimited number of ramps. A unique feature of the device is its ability to correct for signal chain nonlinearities, due to this increased calculation capability.