Qualification testing of the Agilent M9703A digitizer for use in a bathymetric LiDAR

Waveform-resolved, bathymetric lidar applications demand high performance analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) to meet the demands of the high bandwidth, large dynamic range signals which are typical for coastal mapping applications. In this paper, the Agilent M9703A digitizer is evaluated with this criteria in mind and found to be an excellent candidate. Furthermore, the customizable FPGA firmware onboard the M9703A has been used along with a GPU to demonstrate the real-time computation of a lidar coordinate point cloud - significantly reducing the computation time required for current state-of-the-art systems from hours to seconds.