The design of a high speed receiver system for an ultrasound array research platform

Integrated analog front ends (AFEs) are often the preferred choice when designing ultrasound systems. They are convenient, easy to use packages, however do not yet provide the performance needed for high-frequency, wide-bandwidth ultrasound applications e.g. Pre-clinical imaging. These applications require higher sampling frequencies and increased levels of gain than are currently available in commercial AFEs. For high frequency systems it is therefore necessary to design a custom high-frequency AFE. This work reports on a scalable AFE design suited to wide-bandwidth applications. The AFE design is composed of a transmit/receive switch (TX810), a 43.5 dB low noise amplifier (AD8334), channel multiplexer (AD8184), a variable gain amplifier suitable for time gain compensation (THS7530), and a passive filter(9th order Chebyshev). The performance of the AFE design is verified in SPICE and measured using a network analyzer. Results show a 65 MHz -3 dB input bandwidth with an overall gain of 75 dB, smooth phase response and a minimal detectable voltage of 65 μV. The scalable design is suitable for replication across many channels of an imaging system, and has been designed to interface with the existing UARP system (University of Leeds, UK).