How to achieve the flexibility of ultrasound design (1)

For today's ultrasound application market, portability and high performance system designers to meet two key indicators.

Portability promote ultrasonic system to smaller size evolution to meet the user to install the "Pocket" complex ultrasonic tool needs, at the same time, the performance requirements of the decision of the entire system of dynamic range. Higher dynamic range or lower noise can provide higher quality images, so that doctors can better diagnosis. As a general practitioner and clinicians provide high-performance portable ultrasound medical apparatus, system architects, and system components make increasingly higher demands.

This article will provide portable high-performance ultrasonic products must meet some of the most important design considerations, and ultrasound systems designers how to implement as the current global market development of new imaging product flexibility.

System weigh

Although ultrasound system many years of research and development has made significant technological progress, but it still is very complex.

And other complex systems, there are many methods of System Division.

Over the years, the manufacturer through design their own custom ASIC for these complex systems.

Such solutions are usually consists of two ASIC components that integrate time gain compression (TGC) and Rx/Tx on the path of most of the components, as shown in Figure 1. This method in a multiple-channel ADC and DAC VGA, well before the advent of very common. Custom circuit allows designers to integrate some flexible low-cost feature, which over time may reflect the cost advantage, because most of the signal chain integration to external component count is reduced to a minimum. Unfortunately, over time, based on lithography made by ASIC in integration and power both showing its limitations. ASIC has a great deal of logic gates, but this is not a digital technology is optimized for the successful implementation of simulation features, such as high-performance ADC. In addition, because of the limited number of vendors, ASIC also allows the System Designer is only a very small range of choice.

Figure 1: ASIC method

Map type: PROBE probes

T/R Switch a send/receive switching

HV high voltage MUX multiplexer

HV high voltage amplifier AMP

BEAMFORMER CONTROL beam forming control

AAF anti-aliasing filter

High-Speed ADC ADC

CLOCKS clocks

Digital Beamformer digital beam former

High-precision Precision ADC ADC

I/Q Processing I/Q quadrature processing