Design and development of advanced lock-in amplifier and its application

Abstract

Lock-in amplifiers are used to process the analog signals even in the presence of noise sources of greater amplitude. In the present study, an attempt is made to design a C8051F060 microcontroller based lock-in amplifier. The microcontroller contains all the on-chip features to design a single-chip lock-in amplifier. The reference signal for lock-in amplifier is generated by on-chip digital-to-analog converter (DAC) and timer. The signal whose amplitude is to be measured is acquired by on-chip ADC. The ADC values are directly stored on to XRAM through on-chip DMA controller. Later, these stored values are processed by using quadrature sampling method to get amplitude and phase of the 100 waves. The amplitude and phase values of 100 waves are averaged to eliminate the random noise of the signal and are displayed on the LCD module. The amplitude and phase are sent to the PC through on-chip serial port (UART) to store/plot the graph. The proposed lock-in amplifier is applied to study the phase transitions of sulfur sample by varying the temperature at slow rate (0.3 °C/min) using microcontroller based temperature control system. © 2013 IFSA.