This article will discuss some of the most important design considerations that must be met to provide portable high-performance ultrasound products, and how ultrasound system designers can achieve the flexibility needed to develop new imaging products for the current global market.
System tradeoffs
Despite years of research and development of ultrasound systems, significant technological progress has been made, but it is still very complex. As with other complex systems, there are many system division methods.
Over the years, manufacturers have implemented these complex systems by designing their own custom ASICs. This solution usually consists of two ASICs, which integrate time gain compression (TGC) and most of the components on the Rx / Tx path, as shown in Figure 1. This method was common before multichannel VGAs, ADCs, and DACs became widely available. Custom circuits allow designers to integrate some flexible low-cost functional features, which can show cost advantages over time, because integrating most of the signal chain can minimize the number of external components. Unfortunately, over time, ASICs based on photolithography technology have shown limitations in both integration and power consumption. ASIC has a large number of logic gates, but this digital technology is not optimized to successfully implement analog functional features, such as high-performance ADCs. In addition, due to the limited number of suppliers, ASIC also allows system designers to choose within a small range.
Figure 1: ASIC method
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