An MRI pulse programmer has been developed using a single-chip microcontroller (ADμC7026). The microcontroller includes all the components required for the MRI pulse programmer: a 32-bit RISC CPU core, 62 Kbytes of flash memory, 8 Kbytes of SRAM, two 32-bit timers, four 12-bit DA converters, and 40 bits of general purpose I/O. An evaluation board for the microcontroller was connected to a host PC, an MRI transceiver, and a gradient driver using interface circuitry. Target (embedded) and host PC programs were developed to enable MRI pulse sequence generation by the microcontroller. The pulse programmer achieved a (nominal) time resolution of approximately 100 ns and a minimum time delay between successive events of approximately 9 μs. Imaging experiments using the pulse programmer demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.-1-
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.