Performance evaluation of ASICs for CMUT-based portable ultrasound scanners

Portable ultrasound scanners (PUS) have shown to have advantages over stationary scanners such as ease of use, accessibility, transportability and cost. However, PUS are severely restricted on size and power which directly limits the area and power consumption of the electronics. In order to fully utilize the available area and power budget to achieve the best picture quality, application specific integrated circuits (ASICs) are required for the electronics. The ASICs are optimized to drive a specific transducer while minimizing the area and power consumption, which is a key target for PUS. For the purpose of implementing compact probes, CMUTs are used due to their highly compatible integration with ASIC fabrication processes. The goal of this work is to assess the impact of the area and power consumption reduction on the acoustic performance of the scanner. For this purpose, a comparison between a commercial ultrasound pulser and an ASIC optimized for CMUT-based PUS is presented.