384 Channel Modular Ultrasonic CMUT Probe for Rapid Prototyping

This paper presents the design and fabrication of a novel 384 channel modular ultrasonic probe for row-column addressed capacitive micromachined ultrasound transducers. The nose-piece and front-electronics can be freely interchanged in situ, allowing different combinations of transducer arrays and front-end architectures to be characterized and compared, without fabricating an entire probe for each device under test. The probe is designed to facilitate rapid prototyping and full acoustic testing of 192+192 RCA arrays at low cost, and within days after the arrays have been fabricated, but also supports conventional matrix arrays and linear arrays with up to 384 channels with only minor changes.