Laser heterodyne interferometric signal processing method based on rising edge locking with high frequency clock signal

A novel phase measurement method composed of the rising-edge locked signal processing and the digital frequency mixing is proposed for laser heterodyne interferometer. The rising-edge locked signal processing, which employs a high frequency clock signal to lock the rising-edges of the reference and measurement signals, not only can improve the steepness of the rising-edge, but also can eliminate the error counting caused by multi-rising-edge phenomenon in fringe counting. The digital frequency mixing is realized by mixing the digital interference signal with a digital base signal that is different from conventional frequency mixing with analogue signals. These signal processing can improve the measurement accuracy and enhance anti-interference and measurement stability. The principle and implementation of the method are described in detail. An experimental setup was constructed and a series of experiments verified the feasibility of the method in large displacement measurement with high speed and nanometer resolution. (C) 2013 Optical Society of America