Agenda

PhD Thesis Defence

Pitch-Matched Integrated Transceiver Circuits for High-Resolution 3-D Neonatal Brain Monitoring

Peng Guo

Peng Guo will defend his PhD thesis entitled

Pitch-Matched Integrated Transceiver Circuits for High-Resolution 3-D Neonatal Brain Monitoring

on Wednesday, Sept. 27th. The layman's talk will be at 12:00, the defence starts at 12:30.

The thesis can be downloaded from the TU Delft repository. Peng's work was part of the MIFFY project.

Livestream of the defence: link

Promotors: Michiel Pertijs and Nico de Jong

Abstract: This thesis presents the design and implementation of integrated ultrasound transceivers for use in transfontanelle ultrasonography (TFUS). Two generations of ultrasound transceiver ASICs integrated with PZT transducer arrays intended for TFUS are presented. In the first generation, a novel AFE design that combines an LNA with the continuous TGC function is realized in a bid to mitigate the gain-switching and T/R switching artifacts. Besides, a new current-mode micro-beamforming design based on boxcar integration (BI) is also implemented to reduce the channel count within a compact layout. In the second generation, the AFE is derived from the first version, while the design focuses on RX backend circuitry and channel-count reduction, including a passive BI-based µBF merged with a charge-sharing SAR ADC, which digitizes the delayed-and-summed signals, and a subsequent multi-level data link, which concatenates outputs of four ADCs. In total, a 128-fold reduction in channel count is finally achieved. The techniques we developed have established the groundwork and removed the initial barriers for an electronics architecture suitable for a wearable 3D TFUS device.

Overview of PhD Thesis Defence