Electronic data acquisition and operational control system for time-of-flight sputtered neutral mass spectrometer

A new electric data acquisition and operational control system was developed for time-of-flight sputtered neutral mass spectrometry (TOF-SNMS). The system is designed for high-speed data acquisition, data processing, and data streaming. The developed system is constructed on an NI-PXI platform and provides timing clocks for the TOF-SNMS operation. The system performs data processing of noise suppression and ion counting while acquiring TOF mass spectrum for 13-microsecond length at sampling rate of 3 GS/s for every 1 millisecond. In addition, the system acquires and records TOF mass spectrum of 60-microsecond length at sampling rate of 3 GS/s for every 1 millisecond without data processing. The system detects single ion signals from accumulated TOF mass spectrum of 10⁷ times and counts up to 10 ions accurately from a single event of TOF mass spectrum.