A 9-channel low-power receiver ASIC for 3D transesophageal echocardiography

This paper presents a 9-channel low-power receiver ASIC dedicated to a matrix piezoelectric ultrasound transducer for 3D Trans-Esophageal Echocardiography (TEE). It consists of 9 low-noise amplifiers (LNAs), 9 time-gain-compensation (TGC) amplifiers and a 9:1 micro-beamformer. A prototype ASIC has been implemented in 0.35 μm CMOS technology, with a core area of 0.98 mm × 1.7 mm. It is operated at a 3.3 V supply and consumes only 0.5 mW per channel. The measured channel-to-channel mismatch is within ±1 dB. Acoustic measurements proved the micro-beamforming function of the ASIC when processing real ultrasound signals from a 3 × 3 transducer array. These promising results show that this design, after layout optimization, is suitable to be scaled up to accommodate a full matrix transducer.