APPLICTION SPECIFIC INTEGRATED CIRCUIT WITH COLUMN-ROW-PARALLEL ARCHITECTURE FOR ULTRASONIC IMAGING

摘要

An ultrasonic imaging system is described in which a column-row- parallel architecture is provided at the circuit level of an ultrasonic transceiver. The ultrasonic imaging system can include a NxM array (200) of transducer elements (201) and a plurality of transceiver circuits (211) where each transceiver circuit (211) is connected to a corresponding one transducer element (201) of the NxM array (200) of transducer elements. A shared pulser gate driver and a shared VGA is provided for each row and column. Selection logic includes row select, column select, and per-element bit select. Through the column-row-parallel architecture, a variety of aperture configurations can be achieved.