Design and Fabrication of a 2D Array Ultrasonic Transducer

In this paper, a 48x64 channel 2D array ultrasonic transducer with piezoelectric single crystals was designed, fabricated, and evaluated. Structure of the transducer was chosen to facilitate the electric connection on the planar array, and then components were fabricated in accordance with the structure. Detailed structure of the transducer was designed through finite element analyses. In order to improve the performance of the transducer, the crosstalk between adjacent elements was reduced through the control of kerf width and material, and the target frequency bandwidth was achieved through optimal design of the thickness of the single crystal and matching layers. After fabricating a prototype of the transducer according to the design and measuring its characteristics, the results were compared with those of finite element analyses to evaluate the performance of the developed transducer.