An Analog beamformer for integrated high-frequency medical ultrasound imaging
Citation
Gürün, G., Zahorian, J., Tekeş, C., Karaman, M., Hasler, P. E. & Değertekin, F. L. (2011). An analog beamformer for integrated high-frequency medical ultrasound imaging. Paper presented at the 2011 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS), 65-68. doi:10.1109/BioCAS.2011.6107728Abstract
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.
