Design of an Ultrasound Transceiver ASIC with a Switching-Artifact Reduction Technique for 3D Carotid Artery Imaging

Abstract

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 programmable switch matrix that allowed selected transducer elements in each row to be connected to a transmit and receive channel of an imaging system. This made the probe operate like an electronically translatable linear array, allowing large-aperture matrix arrays to be interfaced with a manageable number of system channels. This paper presents a second-generation ASIC that employed an improved switch design to minimize clock feedthrough and charge-injection effects of high-voltage metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (HV MOSFETs), which in the first-generation ASIC caused parasitic transmissions and associated imaging artifacts. The proposed switch controller, implemented with cascaded non-overlapping clock generators, generated control signals with improved timing to mitigate the effects of these non-idealities. Both simulation results and electrical measurements showed a 20 dB reduction of the switching artifacts. In addition, an acoustic pulse-echo measurement successfully demonstrated a 20 dB reduction of imaging artifacts.

Experimental Investigation of the Effect of Subdicing on an Ultrasound Matrix Transducer

“…The PZT matrix was mounted on top of 4×1 tiled ASICs whose element-level circuits match the pitch of the array. The prototype transducer interfaces with a Verasonics V1 imaging system (Verasonics, Inc., Kirkland, WA, USA) using a custom-designed motherboard PCB [3], [10]. The geometry and the composition of the acoustic stack are shown in Fig.…”

“…It is a great challenge to build a matrix array with such a vast number of elements because it requires thousands of electrical connections between the matrix array and the imaging system, which is impractical if not impossible. One of the approaches to overcome this issue is by manufacturing the transducer matrix directly on top of an applicationspecific integrated circuit (ASIC) to reduce the number of cables [3]- [5].…”

Highly Integrated Multiplexing and Buffering Electronics for Large Aperture Ultrasonic Arrays

“…There are a number of ASIC based devices reported in the literature which have utilized unipolar pulsers which save valuable ASIC area [ 50 , 51 ]. The HV switches described here are optimized for bipolar pulsing, and our ASICs do not implement pulsers locally; these are instead integrated in the Verasonics system.…”

“…Charge-injection is a well-known phenomenon in general switching circuits [ 48 – 50 ], and there are a number of proposed techniques for mitigating its effects [ 48 , 49 ]. These include the use of dummy switches to simultaneously emit similar and opposite cancelling charge to offset the charge from the main switches [ 48 ], as well as techniques to reduce the edge rate of the control signals at the gates of the switching devices [ 49 ].…”

Automatic Measurement of the Carotid Blood Flow for Wearable Sensors: A Pilot Study

“…Recently, application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), which include important sections of the electronics needed in an ultrasound system, have been developed. They integrate, for example, the receiver front end and the beamformer [ 7 ], the transmitter and the piezoelectric transducers array [ 8 ], and the complete transmission–reception transceiver [ 9 ]. The availability of these devices fosters the development of compact and economical ultrasound systems [ 10 , 11 , 12 , 13 , 14 ], even based on smartphones [ 15 ], and can change the ultrasound paradigm, opening new scenarios for their employment.…”