The Ardara Technologies Pulsed Optics Power Supply provides three independent fast response +/-200 volt Optics power supplies to drive lenses and RF Power Supply offsets that need to have pulsed voltages.
- With 200 volts per microsecond slew rate, and typical rise times less than a microsecond, it is ideally suited for trapping and releasing ions in linear ion traps prior to injecting them into an orthogonal extraction TOF mass spectrometer.
- Each of the three pulsed optics circuits is effectively a broadband amplifier with a gain of 40, and can drive fairly high frequencies (hundreds of kilohertz) even into fairly high capacitive loads (performance was recently tested with a capacitive load of 3 nanofarads to ground).
- For those customers who have fast acting DAC's or waveform generators, there is a connector in the back to bring a command into each channel of the Pulsed Optics Power Supply, to use it simply as a broadband amplifier.
- In addition, the Pulsed Optics Power Supply can be operated with two independent DC (-5V to +5V) command inputs, with a third TTL pulse to select which of the two command states the output should follow.
- For convenience, front panel controls are also provided to allow ease of tuning and diagnostics.
Each channel of the Pulsed Optics Power Supply can be considered to have six modes of operation, depending upon how you configure the switches on the front panel, and depending on what kinds of voltages you connect to the back panel.
Mode 1: Front panel level control with front panel level state selector - useful for tuning the system up with manual selection of output level.
Mode 2: Front panel level control with external TTL state selection connected to the back panel. - For when you want to have manual control of the two output levels, but want to synchronize with an external device.
Mode 3: Back panel level control inputs with front panel level state selector. - Useful for manually verifying the exact voltages on front panel voltmeter for the two external level command inputs.
Mode 4: Back panel level control inputs with external TTL state selection connected to the back panel. - Complete external control of the two output levels as well as their states.
Mode 5: Same as mode 3, only with a dynamically programmed level (sine wave or arbitrary waveform) programmed into one of the external level inputs, with the front panel switch always selecting the programmed input.
Mode 6: Same as mode 4, but with external TTL state selection that allows you to quickly disable the arbitrary waveform, and substitute either a static or different arbitrary waveform.
Note that this power supply is not intended to be fast enough to be used as the high voltage pulser for a TOF system, rather it was designed to be synchronized with the high voltage pulser, to gate ions into the pulsed extraction region from a linear ion trap prior to the high voltage TOF extraction pulse.