A FPGA-Based Energy Measurement Approach for High-Repetition Rate Narrow Laser Pulses

An approach for the energy measurement of high-repetition rate narrow laser pulses based on a high-performance field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip is presented in this paper. An incident narrow laser pulse is converted to an electrical signal of an appropriate width and of an amplitude linear to the energy of the laser pulse. The electrical signal is then digitalized by a high-speed analog-to-digital converter and fed to an FPGA chip. The amplitude of the electrical signal is acquired by real-time calculations in the FPGA. The test results show that our solution is well designed for the laser pulse with a full-width at half-maximum (FWHM) of 200 ps and a frequency of 20 MHz.