Development of a Multichannel Pulser for Acoustic Scanning Microscopy

AbstractModern ultrasound imaging techniques use arrays to manipulate an ultrasound beam and to gather additional information out of the reflected sound field by analysing the received signal of each channel. For further wide-ranging applicability it is required to achieve a higher resolution by increasing the frequency of excitation signals and improvement of the signal to noise ratio. Actually neither electronic hardware nor high-frequency arrays are available that meet these requirements, so that a further development of the control-electronics is indispensable.Therefor the ultrasound pulser presented in [1] was improved with respect to the generation of various excitation signals. A unit consisting out of 16 channels has been developed containing the technology to control these channels as well as to record and to process the received signals. It provides different types of excitation-functions with an excitation-frequency stepwise increasable up to 40MHz. Additionally the modularised layout allows an extension to control much more elements.All presented improvements are realised in a new ultrasound pulser that offers emission of arbitrary signals on each single channel. Of course the raw data of measurements are accessible and different optional data processing functions are selectable