As one of the effective means of atmosphere detection, lidar is developing towards miniaturization and lightweight. In view of the function specificity of lidar, the detection and acquisition system is integrated and optimized based on field programmable gate array (FPGA). The handshake protocol and the synchronous finite state machine are used to complete the construction and transmission of data link between modules. FIFO is used as the data memoryof ADC, FIFO data is burst into DDR orderly through AXI bus protocol and Xilinx MIG IP, and the transmission of the collected data is completed through Gigabit Ethernet. The data acquisition card of lidar based on FPGA integrates the gain control function of photomultiplier tube and echo signal acquisition function, and supports the compatible hardware and logic design. Therefore, it has many advantages such as high integration, convenient gain adjustment and high precision, fast and convenient acquisition, and fast adaptation.