I have to design a driving board for a UV-Vis spectrometer. The recommended (from the spectrometer's manufacturing company) driving circuit includes a digital buffer for the clock and control signals and an amplifier for the analog output video signal of the spectrometer. Then, I should have an analog to digital converter for my analog signal. I want the analog signal to be converted to digital on this board before moving forward to the main processing board (a Beaglebone Blue board that I have for my prototype). The requirements state that an SPI interface to the main board should be integrated. I am thinking of an ADC with an SPI interface.

I was wondering if there is any need for a small MCU on the driving board in order to control the whole procedure or the SPI communication to the main board's MPU could be enough.

Also, I believe SPI clock should be the same as the clock of the spectrometer. But how ADC and spectrometer clocks should be related? Which features of the ADC I should look at in order to get to a proper design?

 

There is a massive amount of information missing. For starters

the recommended driving circuit
Analog signal voltage and frequency ranges
digital bit width
Whose requirements?

ak

 

Hi AnalogKid!!

Here is the official datasheet of the spectrometer I would like to use: https://www.hamamatsu.com/resources/pdf/ssd/c12880ma_kacc1226e.pdf . The recommended driving circuit drives the analog output video signal to an amplifier and the rest digital signals are buffered. I want to use an ADC integrating an SPI interface. The supply voltage is 4.75V, 5V, 5.25V (min, typ, max) and the frequency range is 0.2 to 5 MHZ. I would prefer a 16-bit resolution for the ADC. The requirements, which I refer to, concern a project I am working at.