Effect of SAR-ADC Non-Idealities on Medical Ultrasound B-Mode Imaging

Abstract

In traditional 2-D ultrasound probes, a 1-D transducer array is directly connected to an imaging system. With the introduction of 3-D probes that have 2-D arrays with thousands of elements, this approach has become impractical. Ultrasound ASICs can enable this transition by shifting part of the system functionality into the probe to reduce interconnect and cost. On-chip implementation of the analog-to-digital converter (ADC) has recently been shown to be particularly beneficial but comes with a significant power and area penalty. Current ultrasound converters are commonly implemented as successive approximation register (SAR) ADCs and designed following general-purpose design methodologies. In this work, the impact of SAR ADC non-idealities on postprocessed images is studied to achieve better trade-offs between performance and cost for ultrasound imaging.