Integrated Transceiver Circuits for Carotid and Intra-Cardiac Ultrasound Imaging

This thesis describes the design and realization of integrated ultrasound transceivers for carotid artery imaging and intracardiac echocardiography (ICE). The goal of this work is to investigate system- and circuit-level techniques to address requirements and implementation bottlenecks in these applications. Prototype chips are presented to demonstrate the effective of these techniques. The first prototype provides cable-count reduction and the capability to interface with a large-aperture transducer array for 3D carotid artery imaging. The second prototype is targeted at a 2D ICE probe, and features a novel bipolar high-voltage (HV) pulser, and an analog front-end with continuous time-gain compensation while achieving a superior noise efficiency factor.