RTC5 SCANLAB Control Board

The SCANLAB RTC5 Series Control Boards provide synchronous, interference-resistant control of scan systems, lasers and peripheral equipment in real time. It is manufactured as a PC interface board, or as a PCIExpress board.

A high-performance signal processor and the supplied DLL simplify programming under Windows. Software commands are loaded into the RTC5's freely-configurable list buffer and processed by the DSP. Every 10 µs, appropriate signals are output to or read-out from the scan system, laser and peripheral equipment.

The RTC5 communicates with scan systems via the SL2-100 data transfer protocol. This protocol supports 20-bit control signals and thereby a 16x higher positioning resolution compared to the RTC4 predecessor board. The RTC5's processor automatically performs micro-vectorization and image field correction.

For laser control, various programmable laser signals are available for vector and bitmap processing. During execution, the board can provide automatic position/speed/vector-dependent readjustment of laser power. Furthermore, the scan system can be synchronized to the laser. This "output synchronization" is a prerequisite for exact and reproducible laser processing when the laser-pulse signal is defined by a fixed (external) laser clock, as is the case for ultrashort pulse lasers.

For SCANLAB scan systems with fully digital servo electronics (e.g. intelliSCAN, intellicube, intelliDRILL, intelliWELD, powerSCAN i), the RTC5 also supports all possibilities arising from the iDRIVEtechnology. This includes real-time monitoring and remote diagnosis of key operational parameters, simulation-assisted process optimization and the use of different dynamics tunings. The feedback of the scan-system speed can be used for speed-dependent laser control.

Numerous options provide the extensive flexibility system integrators need for meeting diverse customer requirements.