The card harnesses the low cost but high performance of an Altera Cyclone 3 FPGA to control 2 multi channel laser diode drivers to generate single / multiple pulses or an arbitrary pulse train via an on-board mounted laser.

A 32-bit PIC micro-controller on-board is used to control and configure the FPGA and other peripheral on board. This allows for new FPGA firmware to be downloaded, configuration data and more importantly the waveform patterns to be downloaded into the on-board non-volatile flash memory.

USB serial connections are available allowing for flexible connectivity to any Windows or Linux platform. An external I²C bus is made available from the PIC along with an SPI port and GPIO lines from the FPGA to allow control of external devices via the PIC.

Clocking for the FPGA is generated by an on card programmable low jitter clock generator from Analog Devices, using either an on board or external reference clock. Triggers also can be generated internally or externally to allow synchronisation with other devices via 50 ohm terminated SMC connectors.

The board accepts any 14-pin butterfly package with the standard pump laser pin-out.  Temperature control is provided for the laser ensuring a stable and constant operating temperature.  The temperature can be adjusted by the micro-controller to allow for thermal wavelength tuning of the laser if necessary away from the default 25°C set-point.

The entire card operates from  +12V and +5V supplies.

Typical applications include generating single or multiple pulses for optical measurement systems.