National Semiconductor unveils industry’s first eight-channel transmit/receive chipset for portable ultrasound systems

HONG KONG: National Semiconductor Corp. has unveiled the industry’s first eight-channel ultrasound transmit/receive chipset specifically designed for portable ultrasound systems used in hospitals, clinics, ambulances and remote point-of-care facilities.

The PowerWise chipset’s innovative circuit architecture enables the design of both hand-carried and handheld units that deliver longer battery life and imaging performance comparable to larger console systems.

National provides a complete eight-channel transmit/receive chipset , including receive analog front end (AFE), transmit/receive switch, transmit pulser and configurable transmit beamformer.

This high-level of integration allows system designers to build lightweight 128-channel portable ultrasound systems with enhanced image quality and diagnostics in a small footprint. National supports the chipset with comprehensive evaluation kits, reference schematics and tools that help customers make detailed chip performance evaluations and accelerate time-to-market.

“Previously, this level of ultrasound imaging quality was only attainable with large cart-based consoles,” said Dr. Norbert Gaus, CEO of the Clinical Products Division of Siemens Healthcare. “National Semiconductor has significantly raised the bar in terms of imaging performance and low-power consumption for portable ultrasound systems.”

National’s eight-channel chipset includes four integrated circuits (ICs) that work together to deliver unmatched performance and power efficiency. For example, the transmit beamformer can be configured to calibrate the board trace delay mismatch and pulser delay mismatch. This significantly improves the distortion performance and enables second harmonic imaging. The transmit/receive switch gives system designers the flexibility to trade-off power versus performance by selecting different bias current settings.

National’s unique AFE architecture provides superior imaging quality and B-mode power consumption that is 10 percent lower than the closest comparable AFE. It includes the industry’s highest resolution digital variable gain amplifier (DVGA) and a low-power continuous-time sigma-delta (CTSD) analog-to-digital converter (ADC).

The DVGA offers several advantages over traditional analog VGAs such as better channel-to-channel matching and higher spectral performance. The CTSD ADC provides inherent brickwall anti-aliasing filtering in comparison to higher power consuming, low-order anti-aliasing filters found in other AFEs that use conventional pipeline ADCs.

National offers a full signal path solution for portable ultrasound systems, including clocking devices and power management ICs.