Ultrasound System Considerations and their Impact on Front-End Components

Introduction Medical ultrasound machines are some of the most sophisticated signal processing machines in use today. As in any machine there are many trade-offs in implementations due to performance requirements, physics, and cost. This paper will try to show the trade-offs for ultrasound front-end circuits by starting from a high-level system overview followed by a more detailed description of how ultrasound systems work. Some system level understanding is necessary to fully appreciate the desired front-end integrated circuit (IC) functions and performance, especially for: the Low Noise Amplifier (LNA); Time Gain Control (TGC); and A/D Converters (ADC). “Front-end” is defined in this paper as all circuitry including the beamformers, even though the primary focus is on the analog signal processing components up to and including the ADCs.

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