A high speed photon counter system for microwave mercury ion frequency standard

Abstract

This report describes a high speed photon counter system for microwave mercury ion frequency standard based on a field programmable gate array (FPGA). A high speed comparator is chosen to convert analog signal to digital pulse. A circuit with low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) receiver in FPGA is used to capture the rising edges of the pulses. In our experiment, the clock of the Altera FPGA EP4CE10E22C8N is 80 MHz which is easy for logic design, and the de-serialization factor of the LVDS receiver is 8, the measured minimum pulse width that can be correctly captured is about 1.67 ns. As a compact and low-cost module, the photon counter system is used for the microwave mercury ion frequency standard.