TIDUEP0 May 2020
Significant technological advancements and a high degree of integration in medical imaging, especially hand-held ultrasound smart probes, are pushing engineers to come up with highly efficient, noise-immune power systems in a small size. This reference design documents end-to-end power and data acquisition, for our high-performance 128-channel transmitter and 64-channel receiver design (Highly Integrated Signal Chain Solutions TX7332 and AFE5832LP for Smart Ultrasound Probes). The power tree includes a single-stage transformer-less high-voltage generation (± 80 V and height <5mm) for transmit and the point-of-load low-voltage for the AFEs & FPGA from a 5 V USB Type-C™. This reference design enables low-noise (< 10mV ripple), efficient rails and better thermal performance (< 10°C temperature rise) achieving system efficiency – 80%, receive data SNR > 55dB and ultra-compact size (90mm by 45mm by 20mm). All power rails can be synchronized to an external clock using our integrated buffer-divider CDCE949. This design also supports 1-S battery input with a normal ultrasound operation of up to 2 hours.