A Review of Broadband Microfabricated Ultrasonic Systems for Biomedical Applications

Abstract

Starting from an overview of historical aspects of biomedical ultrasound development and its application areas, as well as the brief description of state-of-the art microfabrication technologies, used for capacitive and piezoelectrical micromachined ultrasonic transducers manufacturing, also outlining their modelling approaches, the reader will be further presented with an overview of existing methods for achieving broadband operation both at unit transducer and transducers array levels. Moreover, a generalized signal processing system is discussed, including description of known approaches for building blocks implementation in analog, digital and mixed-signal domains (such as drivers, amplifiers, ADCs, etc.).

Keywords

• biomedical ultrasound
• wideband transducers
• micromachined ultrasonic transducers (MUTs)
• CMUT
• PMUT
• ASIC