Design of a Multichannel Pulser/Receiver and Optimized Damping Resistor for High-Frequency Transducer Applied to SAM System

• Main Authors: Ngoc Thang Bui, Thi My Tien Nguyen, Tran Thanh Nam Dinh, Quoc Cuong Bui, Tan Hung Vo, Duc Tri Phan, Sumin Park, Jaeyeop Choi, Yeon-Hee Kang, Byung-Gak Kim, Junghwan Oh
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2020-11-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: scanning acoustic microscopy (SAM); high-frequency transducer; pulse generator; high-speed PCB design
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/10/23/8388

Scanning acoustic microcopy (SAM) is widely used in biomedical and industrial applications in dermatology, ophthalmology, intravascular imaging, and small animal images, owing to SAM’s ability to photograph small structures with a good spatial resolution. One of the most important devices of this system is the pulser/receiver (P/R) (PRN-300, Ohlabs Corporation, Nam-gu Busan, Republic of Korea), which generates pulses to trigger a high-frequency transducer. This article presents the design of a pulse generator to excite high-frequency transducers with four channels. The characteristics of the pulses, such as time and frequency, can be reconfigured by using a high-speed field programmable gate array (FPGA). The configuration software was developed for communicating with the P/R device via a USB connector for easy, feasible pulse selection and real-time pulse management. Besides that, during the design and implementation of the hardware, we optimized the damping resistor value to reduce the overshoot and undershoot part of the signal, ensuring the best effect on the transducer signal. The test results show that unipolar pulses worked with transducers with frequencies over 100 MHz. The SAM systems can work simultaneously with multiple transducers, and the resulting images have different resolutions of regions.