A Digital Receive Beamforming IC for High-Frequency Ultrasound Imaging System

An all-digital 16-channel receive beamforming integrated circuit for high-frequency ultrasound imaging systems is presented. The proposed receiver architecture consists of 16 retimers, and a 4-stage delay-and-sum circuit. This architecture can eliminate the time difference received by the receive transducer elements, thereby improving the accuracy of the received data. In addition, compared with the implementation of the receive beamformer using field programmable gate array (FPGA), the proposed beamformer chip has a smaller volume and is easy to integrate with other circuits in the system. The proposed receive beamformer uses a 0.18-μm CMOS technology for a 50-MHz high-frequency linear array with 16 elements. The simulation results indicate that the proposed receive beamforming design can achieve a maximum time delay of 12.33 μs with delay resolution of 20 ns. The supported transducer center frequency ranges from 20 to 50 MHz, and it is highly suitable for high-frequency ultrasound imaging systems.