FPGA-based reconfigurable scanning and data acquisition system for scanning electron microscopy

We present an FPGA-based reconfigurable scanning and data acquisition system for scanning electron microscopy (SEM). Built on the Xilinx Artix-7 (XC7A35T), the system integrates dual-channel 14-bit DAC raster scan waveform generation, dual-channel 12-bit ADC signal acquisition with on-chip averaging, and real-time USB 2.0 High-Speed data streaming at up to 40 MB/s. Integration with a commercial SEM (ModuleSci PicoEye-100) produced clearly resolved secondary-electron images, demonstrating stable raster operation in the fast-scan mode used for alignment and focusing. Standard data acquisition was performed at a per-frame acquisition time of 10 s, and a quantitative image-quality benchmark against the instrument's built-in acquisition channel under this condition, using a grid-hole masking protocol and sub-pixel cross-correlation drift correction (Guizar-Sicairos et al. 2008), demonstrates substantial SNR improvements. The FPGA-based system achieves 41-47% higher spatial SNR and near-theoretical temporal SNR scaling, reaching a [Formula: see text] improvement over the commercial reference. These results highlight the effectiveness of hardware-level synchronization for improving the practical recoverability of high-frequency spatial detail under reduced acquisition time. The modular architecture is applicable to a broad range of point-scanning instruments beyond electron microscopy.