Design and Experimental Validation of a SoC-FPGA-Based Compact NQR Spectrometer

• Published in: IEEE transactions on instrumentation and measurement Vol. 73; pp. 1 - 12
• Main Authors: Kachkachi, Noreddine, Gansmuller, Axel, Rabah, Hassan
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 2024; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Controllability; Digital signal processing; Electronics; Engineering Sciences; Experimental validation; Field programmable gate arrays; Frequency ranges; Hardware; Hexamethylenetetramine; Instrumentation and Detectors; Instruments; Modules; Nuclear magnetic resonance; nuclear quadrupolar resonance (NQR) instrumentation; Nuclei (nuclear physics); Physics; Portability; Pulse duration; Radio frequency; Radio frequency interference; register transfer level (RTL) design; Registers; Sensitivity; Sodium nitrite; Software; Spectrometers; System on chip; system-on-chip field-programmable gate array (SoC-FPGA); NQR instrumentation; RTL design; Sensitivity; Experimental validation; SoC-FPGA
• ISSN: 0018-9456; 1557-9662
• DOI: 10.1109/TIM.2024.3374319

Nuclear quadrupolar resonance (NQR) is a radio frequency (RF) spectroscopy technique providing high-resolution molecular analysis of solid materials containing quadrupolar atomic nuclei. The NQR technique does not necessitate an external magnetic field and, therefore, permits a large number of applications; it nevertheless suffers from relatively low sensitivity. The challenges of NQR instrumentation are therefore to increase its portability and sensitivity, and to limit interference from various noise sources (e.g., RF interference) in order to perform field applications outside the laboratory. To address these challenges, we present a system-on-chip field-programmable gate array (SoC-FPGA) based portable spectrometer integrating the major hardware elements of NQR instrumentation. These include: a high pulsewidth resolution pulse programmer, a fully controllable pulse transmitter, an acquisition module that performs detection, digital signal processing, and storage of the acquired signal in an external memory, in addition to a hardware debugger. Pulser and acquisition Linux applications are embedded on the SoC-FPGA. While many recent compact spectrometers still have crucial RF parts in the analog domain and lack performance optimization, most of our hardware and software modules are digitally implemented on SoC-FPGA. The designed portable spectrometer was successfully tested by detecting the expected frequencies of several samples such as sodium nitrite (NaNO 2 ), hexamethylenetetramine (HMT) or 1,3,5-trichlorobenzene (1,3,5-TCB) covering hence the typical <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">^{14}\text {N} </tex-math></inline-formula> and <inline-formula> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">^{35}\text {Cl} </tex-math></inline-formula> NQR frequency ranges.