OPENCORE NMR
     -- An open kit for implementing an integrated FPGA-based NMR spectrometer --

OPENCORE NMR Main > What for?

What for?


This work has its origin in my student days some time ago, when I used to use a home built spectrometer developed by my supervisors, Profs. T. Terao and K. Takegoshi. The spectrometer was old, but had worked extremely well. I used the spectrometer for solid-state NMR experiments, including dipolar recoupling experiments and dynamic nuclear polarization using the huge spin polarization of the electron spins in the photo-excited state.

Since then I had dreamt of building my own spectrometer, and recently I made it, which would of course have been impossible without my lucky experience of playing with the home-built spectrometer in my student days. Now I feel it would be nice if the designs and the resources that I have developed were available to anyone who want to use it. So, in parallel with my daily research with NMR, I have been preparing to provide a set of the resources required to reproduce the spectrometer, hoping that it may find interests from not only the educational but also researching point of view.

Some people suggested me to start a buisiness with this, but I myself am not interested in it. I do not mean at all to compete against the commercial spectrometers, which are so sophisticated that I do not think the spectrometer presented here could overperform them. Nevertheless, it would ALSO be nice to have a home-built spectrometer in addition to the commercial one, should you come across such a nice idea that requires heavy modification to the hardware inside the spectrometer. It would be my pleasure if this site could push up the progress in academic activities.

If you fully exploit the latest available technologies, construction of a home-built spectrometer is easier than it was some time ago. One of the keywords for such technologies include "core modules", which indicates the customized hardware modules that can be built into a tiny chip of a semiconductor device called FPGA. Remarkably, a core module provides a hardware, but is available as a list of texts, just like a list of texts for a computer program. In this website I have let the source codes for the core modules for the NMR spectrometer be open to public, and for this reason the spectrometer presented here is referred to as the OPENCORE NMR spectrometer.