Low-power high-performance ultrasound front-end architecture for acoustic impedance measurement

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging system employs the envelope detection method to visualize internal body. Reflected sound waves include the depth information of boundaries and the reflection coefficients which can be used to distinguish the different biological tissues. However, due to square operation, the envelope detection do not ex-tract coefficients, causing information loss. Also, the conventional portable ultrasound system suffer from high power consumption because of high analog to digital converter sampling rate and computation for the large data rate. To address these issues, a peak-point sampling technique and analog mixers were utilized for no in-formation loss and low sampling rate, respectively. The simulation results extract actual acoustic impedances other than boundaries and they helps better recognize the characteristics of each layer, achieving low data rate.