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

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

Hopf, Y.M. (TU Delft Electronic Instrumentation)
Ossenkoppele, Boudewine W. (Thoraxcenter)
Soozande, Mehdi (Thoraxcenter)
Noothout, E.C. (TU Delft ImPhys/Medical Imaging)
Chang, Z.Y. (TU Delft Electronic Instrumentation)
Chen, Chao (Thoraxcenter)
Vos, H.J. (TU Delft ImPhys/Medical Imaging)
Bosch, Johan G. (Thoraxcenter)
Verweij, M.D. (TU Delft ImPhys/Medical Imaging)
de Jong, N. (TU Delft ImPhys/Medical Imaging)
Pertijs, M.A.P. (TU Delft Electronic Instrumentation)

2022

In this article, an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for 3-D, high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging probes is presented. The design is the first to combine element-level, high-voltage (HV) transmitters and analog front-ends, 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 interstage 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 pitch-matched 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 time-division multiplexing (TDM), which leads to a 12-fold total channel count reduction. A prototype of $8{\times }9$ elements was fabricated in a TSMC 0.18- $\mu \text{m}$ HV BCD technology and a 2-D PZT transducer matrix with a pitch of $160 \mu \text{m}$ , 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.

3-D ultrasound
Array signal processing
Catheters
high-frame-rate
high-voltage (HV) transmitter
hybrid analog-to-digital converter (ADC)
Imaging
intracardiac echocardiography (ICE)
Probes
subarray beamforming
successive approximation register (SAR)/single-slope (SS) ADC
Transducers
Transmitters
Ultrasonic imaging
ultrasound application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:20c15493-c789-476a-ae45-3080157c6eeb

https://doi.org/10.1109/JSSC.2022.3201758

0018-9200

IEEE Journal of Solid State Circuits, 57 (11), 3228-3242

Accepted Author Manuscript

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Y.M. Hopf, Boudewine W. Ossenkoppele, Mehdi Soozande, E.C. Noothout, Z.Y. Chang, Chao Chen, H.J. Vos, Johan G. Bosch, M.D. Verweij, N. de Jong, M.A.P. Pertijs