Arama Sonuçları

Listeleniyor 1 - 3 / 3
  • Yayın
    An Analog beamformer for integrated high-frequency medical ultrasound imaging
    (IEEE, 2011) Gürün, Gökçe; Zahorian, Jaime; Tekeş, Coşkun; Karaman, Mustafa; Hasler, Paul E.; Değertekin, Fahrettin Levent
    We designed and fabricated a dynamic receive beamforming integrated circuit (IC) in 0.35-mu m CMOS technology. This beamformer is suitable for integration with an ultrasound annular array for high-frequency (30-50 MHz) intravascular ultrasound (IVUS) imaging. The beamformer IC is capable of buffering, delaying and preamplification for 8 receive channels. We explored an analog delay cell based on a currentmode first-order all-pass filter, which is used as the basic building block to form an analog dynamic delay line. We also explored a bandwidth enhancement method on the delay cell that improved the overall bandwidth of the delay line by a factor of 6. Each delay cell consumes 2.1 mW of power and is capable of generating a tunable delay between 1.75 ns to 2.5 ns, enabling dynamic receive beamforming over a focal range from 1.4 mm to 2 mm. We successfully integrated the fabricated beamformer IC with an 8-element annular array. Our experimental test results demonstrated the desired buffering, preamplification and delaying capabilities of the beamformer.
  • Yayın
    Subarray delta-sigma beamforming for ultrasonic imaging
    (IEEE, 2002) Bilge, Hasan Şakir; Karaman, Mustafa
    We present a beamforming architecture based on subarray processing with non-uniform oversampling 1-bit delta-sigma (??) modulation. The subarray processing combines conventional phased array and synthetic aperture approaches to form a large aperture using small subarrays thus reduces active channel count. ??-based beamforming improves the efficiency of front-end processing further: oversampling permits precise delaying and single bit data processing simplifies beamforming operation. To reduce the number of firings we use a low beam density associated with the subarray size, and then increase the beam density by lateral interpolation prior to coherent beam summation. Our experimental test results show that the proposed scheme provides high-resolution beamforming while simplifying the front-end.
  • Yayın
    A tunable analog delay element for high-frequency dynamic beamforming
    (IEEE, 2009) Gürün, Gökçe; Şişman, Alper; Zahorian, Jaime S.; Satır, Sarp; Karaman, Mustafa; Hasler, Paul E.; Değertekin, Fahrettin Levent
    Implementing beamforming for high frequency arrays is challenging because of the accurate delay requirements at high frequencies. High frequency digital beamforming is not suitable for catheter based applications as a large number of cables is required between the array and the external beamformer. A possible solution is to perform analog beamforming on an integrated circuit adjacent or monolithically integrated to the imaging array. In this study, we introduce an improved voltage in voltage out low pass filter as an analog delay cell for high frequency dynamic beamformers. This circuit can generate three times more delay with a given bandwidth when compared to conventional low pass filters. Delay of the circuit is tunable and the gain of the cell is inherently very close to unity. The proposed delay cell operates single ended and therefore is more suitable for CMUT operation which generates single ended output. We designed a test beamformer for a 30MHz, equal area, annular array with 100% bandwidth using the proposed delay cell and the unit-delay focusing architecture. Required delays are implemented using a delay line made up of improved delay elements with tunable delays. To demonstrate functionality we designed and fabricated a custom front-end IC in a 0.5µm standard CMOS process. The IC chip consists of 8 transimpedance amplifiers, voltage-to-current converters, the analog dynamic beamformer, and two buffers. We present results of preliminary imaging experiments that demonstrate the focusing capability.