High-stable RF-frequency generation using a microcontroller for amplitude modulation based absolute distance measurement

In this paper, we describe high-stable RF-frequency generation using a low-cost 8-bit microcontroller for amplitudemodulation based distance measurement, which is one of the indispensable technologies for cost-effective Lidar application. The RF frequency generator using the microcontroller was implemented by externally referencing to an atomic clock and 8-bit timer/pulse width modulation (PWM) functions, which are embedded in a microcontroller. The microcontroller we used was ATmega128 of Microchip with 16 MHz clock and 8-bit timer, which generates the maximum frequency of up to 62.5 kHz, enabling 2.4-kilometer ranging without phase ambiguity. The stability of RF-frequency generated from the implemented system was evaluated in terms of Allan deviation using a commercial frequency counter. The stability indicated 10^-11 at 1-s averaging time and 10^-12 at 100 s averaging time, which represents a 1/10 degradation compared to the stability of the commercial function generator. Along with the stability evaluation, we interrogated frequency tunability, which extends a measurable range without phase ambiguity.