A Compact Integrated High-Voltage Pulser Insensitive to Supply Transients for 3-D Miniature Ultrasound Probes

A Compact Integrated High-Voltage Pulser Insensitive to Supply Transients for 3-D Miniature Ultrasound Probes

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

2022

In this letter, a compact high-voltage (HV) transmit circuit for dense 2-D transducer arrays used in 3-D ultrasonic imaging systems is presented. Stringent area requirements are addressed by a unipolar pulser with embedded transmit/receive switch. Combined with a capacitive HV level shifter, it forms the ultrasonic HV transmit circuit with the lowest reported HV transistor count and area without any static power consumption. The balanced latched-based level shifter implementation makes the design insensitive to transients on the HV supply caused by pulsing, facilitating application in probes with limited local supply decoupling, such as imaging catheters. Favorable scaling through resource sharing benefits massively arrayed architectures while preserving full individual functionality. A prototype of 8 × 9 elements was fabricated in the TSMC 0.18 μm HV BCD technology and a 160μm×160μm PZT transducer matrix is manufactured on the chip. The system is designed to drive 65-V peak-to-peak pulses on 2-pF transducer capacitance and hardware sharing of six elements allows for an area of only 0.008 mm2 per element. Electrical characterization as well as acoustic results obtained with the 6-MHz central frequency transducer are demonstrated.

BCD technology
CMOS
high-voltage (HV) level shifter
high-voltage pulser
PZT transducer
supply transient
transmit/receive switching
ultrasound

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:141385ee-1b0a-4976-bbe2-cf3b324c7825

https://doi.org/10.1109/LSSC.2022.3180071

2023-07-01

2573-9603

IEEE Solid State Circuits Letters, 5, 166-169

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

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