Medical ultrasound has become a crucial part of modern society and continues to play a vital role in the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses. Over the past decades, the development of medical ultrasound has seen extraordinary progress as a result of the tremendous research advances in microelectronics, transducer technology and signal processing algorithms. However, medical ultrasound still faces many challenges including powerefficient driving of transducers, low-noise recording of ultrasound echoes, effective beamforming in a non-linear, high-attenuation medium (human tissues) and reduced overall form factor. This paper provides a comprehensive review of the design of integrated circuits for medical ultrasound applications. The most important and ubiquitous modules in a medical ultrasound system are addressed, i) transducer driving circuit, ii) low-noise amplifier, iii) beamforming circuit and iv) analog-digital converter. Within each ultrasound module, some representative research highlights are described followed by a comparison of the state-of-the-art. This paper concludes with a discussion and recommendations for future research directions.
This paper presents a CMOS ultrasound analog front-end for wearable A-mode ultrasound hand gesture recognition. This analog front-end is part of the research into using ultrasound to record and decode muscle signals with the aim of controlling a prosthetic hand in contrast to the conventional method, surface electromyography. In this paper, the design of a pulser for driving piezoelectric transducers as well as a low-noise amplifier for the received echoes are presented. Simulation results show that the pulser circuit is capable of driving a 137 pF capacitive load with 30 V pulses at a frequency of 1 MHz and dissipates 142.1 mW power. The lownoise amplifier demonstrates a gain of 34 dB and an inputreferred noise of 8.58 nV/√Hz at 1 MHz.
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