Development of A Simple, Low Cost, Microcontroller based Universal Interface for Ion Beam Dose Measurement

Measuring ion beam currents of the order of 10-12A to 10-3A and associated charges is one of the important requirements with particle accelerator based materials research. Most of the commercially available standard Ion Beam Current Integrators employed for these measurements, often lack the features which directly enable them compatible for Personal Computer(PC) based automated ion beam irradiation and characterization experiments. Based on the popular, features-rich PIC16F877A microcontroller, a low cost universal interface has been designed and developed for facilitating interfacing of commercial as well as home-made current integrators to PCs used with automated ion irradiation experiments. In this interface, the microcontroller was programmed using C while Graphical User Interface for the ion beam experiments was done using G language, LabVIEW. The interface developed was successfully used to interface a 7803 Fastcomtec current digitiser with the automated irradiation experimental set up of a 1.7 MV Tandetron Accelerator. Design concepts involved and salient features of the interface are discussed here.