A customized control and readout device for vector magnetometers based on nitrogen-vacancy centers.

A customized control and readout device, which is developed to perform real-time measurement for vector magnetometers based on nitrogen-vacancy centers, is presented in this paper. A dual-channel analog-to-digital-converter chip, which has a 25 MSa/s sampling rate and a 16 bits amplitude resolution, is integrated for analog signal acquisition. The data processing and the system control are realized using a Xilinx Kirtex-7 field-programmable-gate-array chip. Eight independent lock-in modules, a four-channel proportional-integral-derivative controller, a reference generator, and a vector field reconstruction module are integrated with the Kirtex-7 device in order to perform the real-time vector magnetic field measurement. The device has a bright future to be applied in practical applications.