State-of-the-art 3-D medical ultrasound imaging requires transmitting and receiving ultrasound using a 2-D array of ultrasound transducers with hundreds or thousands of elements. A tight combination of the transducer array with integrated circuitry eliminates bulky cables connecting the elements of the transducer array to a separate system of electronics. Furthermore, preamplifiers located close to the array can lead to improved receive sensitivity. A combined IC and transducer array can lead to a portable, high-performance, and inexpensive 3-D ultrasound imaging system. This paper presents an IC flip-chip bonded to a 16 x 16-element capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) array for 3-D ultrasound imaging. The IC includes a transmit beamformer that generates 25-V unipolar pulses with programmable focusing delays to 224 of the 256 transducer elements. One-shot circuits allow adjustment of the pulse widths for different ultrasound transducer center frequencies. For receiving reflected ultrasound signals, the IC uses the 32-elements along the array diagonals. The IC provides each receiving element with a low-noise 25-MHz-bandwidth transimpedance amplifier. Using a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) clocked at 100 MHz to operate the IC, the IC generated properly timed transmit pulses with 5-ns accuracy. With the IC flip-chip bonded to a CMUT array, we show that the IC can produce steered and focused ultrasound beams. We present 2-D and 3-D images of a wire phantom and 2-D orthogonal cross-sectional images (Bscans) of a latex heart phantom.
We present the design of an integrated circuit (IC) that will be flip-chip bonded to a 16×16-element CMUT array. The IC provides 16 receive channels which can be configured to receive along either of the array diagonals or on any single row of the array. On transmit, all 256 elements can be used to transmit arbitrarily focused beams. Focused transmission with the full array is made possible by on-chip pulsers and memory. A 25-V pulser and 8-bit shift register is provided for each element of the array. Prior to each transmit, new values are loaded into the shift registers. Current-controlled one-shots control the transmit pulse widths. Circuit simulations and the IC layout are presented. Simulations predict that delay values can be loaded in less than 1.3 µs and show the generation of precisely timed pulses. The IC is being prepared for submission to National Semiconductor for fabrication in a high-voltage BiCMOS process.
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