A 1.54mW/Element 150μm-Pitch-Matched Receiver ASIC with Element-Level SAR/Shared-Single-Slope Hybrid ADCs for Miniature 3D Ultrasound Probes

Li, Jing; Chen, Zhao; Tan, Mingliang; Willigen, Durk van; Chen, Chao; Chang, Zu-yao; Noothout, Emile; Jong, Nico de; Verweij, Martin D.; Pertijs, Michiel A. P.

doi:10.23919/vlsic.2019.8778200

Cited by 12 publications

(16 citation statements)

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“…For the reasons above, system integration of electronics and transducers can play a vital role in the future of this field. By exploring high-efficiency phased-array transmit beamforming circuits [36,37] with architectures tailored for the specificity of ultrasound neuromodulation, such as longer pulse durations and higher focal pressures, miniaturized ultrasound stimulators with high spatial resolution and electronic controlled focal spot location can potentially be achieved.…”

Section: Ultrasound Stimulation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bidirectional Bioelectronic Interfaces: System Design and Circuit Implications

Liu¹,

Urso²,

Ponte³

et al. 2020

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Mag.

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Section: Ultrasound Stimulation Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bidirectional Bioelectronic Interfaces: System Design and Circuit Implications

Liu¹,

Urso²,

Ponte³

et al. 2020

IEEE Solid-State Circuits Mag.

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“…One drawback of SAR ADCs in general is the exponential increase of the CDAC size per added bit of resolution in the binary search algorithm. This can be alleviated by means of combination with a slope ADC that digitizes the residual of a SAR first stage in a hybrid converter [33], [47]. A slope ADC can be compact but suffers in efficiency when converting with a high resolution and sampling rate.…”

Section: Hybrid Adcmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The ADC is interfacing with the subarray beamformer as shown in Fig. 3, avoiding the need for an additional highbandwidth buffer compared to converters with conventional sampling [33], [47]. The delaying of the received signals is implemented by means of capacitive sample-and-hold (S/H) cells, similar to [48].…”

Section: Hybrid Adcmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both ways, current digital ICE probe designs still suffer from large ADCs. This expresses itself in the reported designs not being able to match the element-level circuitry to the transducer pitch [28], [31], a requirement for a scalable system, or the associated silicon area requirement making co-integration with adequate transmit circuitry impossible [15], [32], [33]. These transmitters need to excite the transducer elements with high-voltage (HV) pulses to obtain sufficient signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for around 10 cm imaging depth, requiring the use of HV transistors with large isolation rings [6].…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Pitch-Matched Transceiver ASIC With Shared Hybrid Beamforming ADC for High-Frame-Rate 3-D Intracardiac Echocardiography

Hopf

Ossenkoppele

Soozande

et al. 2022

IEEE J. Solid-State Circuits

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In this paper, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for 3D, high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging probes is presented. The design is the first to combine element-level, high-voltage (HV) transmitters and analog frontends, subarray beamforming, and in-probe digitization in a scalable fashion for catheter-based probes. The integration challenge is met by a hybrid analog-to-digital converter (ADC), combining an efficient charge-sharing successive-approximation-register (SAR) first stage and a compact single-slope (SS) second stage. Application in large ultrasound imaging arrays is facilitated by directly interfacing the ADC with a charge-domain subarray beamformer, locally calibrating inter-stage gain errors and generating the SAR reference using a power-efficient local reference generator. Additional hardware-sharing between neighboring channels ultimately leads to the lowest reported area and power consumption across miniature ultrasound probe ADCs. A pitchmatched design is further enabled by an efficient split between the core circuitry and a periphery block, the latter including a datalink performing clock-data-recovery (CDR) and timedivision multiplexing (TDM), which leads to a 12-fold total channel-count reduction. A prototype of 8×9 elements was fabricated in TSMC 0.18-µm HV BCD technology and a 2D PZT transducer matrix with a pitch of 160 µm and a center frequency of 6 MHz was manufactured on the chip. The imaging device operates at up to 1000 volumes/s, generates 65-V transmit pulses and has a receive power consumption of only 1.23 mW/element. The functionality has been demonstrated electrically as well as in acoustic and imaging experiments.

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“…Lee et al proposed a dynamic-bit-sharing technique based on the similarity of beamformed ultrasound signals, which allows adjacent element-level SAR ADCs in a 2×2 subarray to share the most-significant-bits, thus saving power [30]. Another hardware-sharing idea was proposed in [71], where a hybrid SAR/single-slope ADC shares its ramp generator with adjacent channels in a 2×2 subarray for area reduction. Both designs demonstrate promising area and power efficiency.…”

Section: Element-level Digitizationmentioning

confidence: 99%