An Amplitude-Programmable Energy-Recycling High-Voltage Resonant Pulser for Battery-Powered Ultrasound Devices

Imad Bellouki*, Nuriel N.M. Rozsa, Zu Yao Chang, Zhao Chen, Mingliang Tan, Michiel A.P. Pertijs

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

1 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

This article presents an application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for battery-powered ultrasound (US) devices. The ASIC implements a novel energy-efficient high-voltage (HV) pulser that generates HV transmit (TX) pulses directly from a low-voltage (LV) battery supply. By means of a single off-chip inductor, energy is supplied to a US transducer in a resonant fashion, directly generating half-period sinusoidal HV pulses on the transducer, while consuming substantially less energy than a conventional class-D pulser. By recycling residual reactive energy from the transducer back to the input, the energy consumption is further reduced by more than 50%. The autocalibration techniques are leveraged to deal with tolerances of the inductor, transducer, and battery supply and thus maximize the energy efficiency. A prototype chip was fabricated in TSMC 0.18-μm HV BCD technology and used to drive external 120-pF capacitive micromachined US transducers (CMUTs) with a center frequency of approximately 2.5 MHz. Electrical measurements show that the prototype can generate pulses with a peak amplitude between 10 and 30 V accurate to within ±1 V. Acoustic measurements demonstrate successful ultrasonic pulse transmission and pulse-echo measurements. The prototype reaches a peak efficiency of 0.23 fCV 2 , which is the highest reported to date for HV pulsers targeting US imaging.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)2048-2059
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Journal of Solid-State Circuits
Volume60
Issue number6
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2024

Bibliographical note

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository as part of the Taverne amendment. More information about this copyright law amendment can be found at https://www.openaccess.nl. Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Keywords

  • Battery-powered operation
  • energy recycling
  • high-voltage (HV) pulser
  • resonant pulser
  • ultrasound (US) application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC)
  • US imaging
  • wearable US

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'An Amplitude-Programmable Energy-Recycling High-Voltage Resonant Pulser for Battery-Powered Ultrasound Devices'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this