Phase-rotation based receive-beamformer for miniaturized volumetric ultrasound imaging scanners using 2-D CMUT-on-ASIC arrays

Up-to-date capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) technologies provide us unique opportunities to minimize the size and cost of ultrasound scanners by integrating front-end circuits into CMUT arrays. We describe a design prototype of a portable ultrasound scan-head probe using 2-D phased CMUT-on-ASIC arrays of 3-MHz 250 micrometer-pitch by fabricating and integrating front-end electronics with 2-D CMUT array elements. One of the objectives of our work is to design a receive beamformer architecture for the smart probe with compact size and comparable performance. In this work, a phase-rotation based receive beamformer using the sampling frequency of 4 times the center frequency and a hybrid beamforming to reduce the channel counts of the system-side are introduced. Parallel beamforming is considered for the purpose of saving power consumption of battery (by firing fewer times per image frame). This architecture has the advantage of directly obtaining I and Q components. By using the architecture, the interleaved I/Q data from the storage is acquired and I/Q demodulation for baseband processing is directly achieved without demodulators including sin and cosine lookup tables and mixers. Currently, we are extending the presented architecture to develop a true smart probe by including lower power devices and cooling systems, and bringing wireless data transmission into consideration.