Digital pulse processor for ion beam microprobe tomography

A digital pulse processor, suitable for 3D imaging with focused ion beam techniques, has been developed using a high performance FPGA (field-programmable gate array) and a high-level FPGA design tool. The hardware and software implementation of several components, including analog signal conditioning, trapezoidal filtering, and median filtering, are presented. The system is applied to the 3D STIM (scanning transmission ion microscopy) tomography technique.