Receiving electronics for intra-oral ultrasound probe

In this paper, we present the receiving electronics used in an intra-oral ultrasound probe which can be integrated with a PC or microcontroller based system to form a portable ultrasound imaging system. In general, this probe will house the transmitting circuitry, the transducers and the receiving electronics of an ultrasound imaging system. The receiving electronics, made up of the pre-amplifier arrays and beamformer will be presented here, with the focus on the pre-amplifier arrays, which has been successfully implemented. The pre-amplifier condition the echoes signals by amplifying and preventing noise interferences. It also acts as the impedance converter between the transducer and beamforming stage. This is performed at centre frequency of 20 MHz whilst driving loads equivalent to coaxial cables. The beamformer uses delay/storage elements to align the amplified echoes signals in time before summing them for processing. Analog storage elements will be utilised together with digital control signals for this ASIC.