A Pitch-Matched Low-Noise Analog Front-End With Accurate Continuous Time-Gain Compensation for High-Density Ultrasound Transducer Arrays

This article presents a compact analog front-end (AFE) circuit for ultrasound receivers with linear-in-dB continuous gain control for time-gain compensation (TGC). The AFE consists of two variable-gain stages, both of which employ a novel complementary current-steering network (CCSN) as the interpolator to realize continuously variable gain....

A Tiled Ultrasound Matrix Transducer for Volumetric Imaging of the Carotid Artery

High frame rate three-dimensional (3D) ultrasound imaging would offer excellent possibilities for the accurate assessment of carotid artery diseases. This calls for a matrix transducer with a large aperture and a vast number of elements. Such a matrix transducer should be interfaced with an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for...

Design of an ultrasound transceiver asic with a switching-artifact reduction technique for 3D carotid artery imaging

This paper presents an ultrasound transceiver application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) directly integrated with an array of 12 × 80 piezoelectric transducer elements to enable next-generation ultrasound probes for 3D carotid artery imaging. The ASIC, implemented in a 0.18 µm high-voltage Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (HV BCD) process, adopted a...

A Reconfigurable Ultrasound Transceiver ASIC With 24 x 40 Elements for 3-D Carotid Artery Imaging

This paper presents an ultrasound transceiver application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) designed for 3-D ultrasonic imaging of the carotid artery. This application calls for an array of thousands of ultrasonic transducer elements, far exceeding the number of channels of conventional imaging systems. The 3.6 x 6.8 mm² ASIC...

A Pitch-Matched Front-End ASIC With Integrated Subarray Beamforming ADC for Miniature 3-D Ultrasound Probes

This paper presents a front-end application-specified integrated circuit (ASIC) integrated with a 2-D PZT matrix transducer that enables in-probe digitization with acceptable power dissipation for the next-generation endoscopic and catheter-based 3-D ultrasound imaging systems. To achieve power-efficient massively parallel analog-to-digital...

A Front-End ASIC with Receive Sub-array Beamforming Integrated with a 32 × 32 PZT Matrix Transducer for 3-D Transesophageal Echocardiography

This paper presents a power-and area-efficient front-end application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that is directly integrated with an array of 32 × 32 piezoelectric transducer elements to enable next-generation miniature ultrasound probes for real-time 3-D transesophageal echocardiography. The 6.1 × 6.1 mm² ASIC, implemented...