A review of demodulation techniques for multifrequency atomic force microscopy

Abstract

This article compares the performance of traditional and recently proposed demodulators for multifrequency atomic force microscopy. The compared methods include the lock-in amplifier, coherent demodulator, Kalman filter, Lyapunov filter, and direct-design demodulator. Each method is implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) with a sampling rate of 1.5 MHz. The metrics for comparison include the sensitivity to other frequency components and the magnitude of demodulation artifacts for a range of demodulator bandwidths. Performance differences are demonstrated through higher harmonic atomic force microscopy imaging.

Keywords

• atomic force microscopy (afm)
• multifrequency
• demodulation
• kalman filter
• lyapunov filter
• digital signal processing
• field-programmable gate array (fpga)