2026-10-14T22:53:44Z https://www.scidb.cn/oai

10.57760/sciencedb.0137l 2026-09-22T21:37:40Z

2026-09-22 A Multi-Channel Bipolar Programmable CMOS Pulser With PMUT Array for Synthetic Aperture Ultrasound Imaging doi:10.57760/sciencedb.0137l en Piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducers (PMUTs) offer immense potential for continuous medical imaging. The development of wearable PMUTs ultrasound platforms is currently bottlenecked by the reliance on unipolar excitation, which limits bandwidth, degrades power efficiency, and introduces DC-bias artifacts. To overcome these limitations, this paper proposes a hardware co-design methodology integrating a custom bipolar multi-channel programmable Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) pulser with a 32-channel wideband piezoelectric micromachined ultrasonic transducer (PMUT) array. Fabricated using a 0.18 μ m BCD process, the transmit circuit generates flexible 2-level to 5-level bipolar stepped waveforms with adjustable frequencies (1–5 MHz) and an 7.4 Vpp amplitude. This multi-level bipolar excitation strictly suppresses high-order harmonic distortion, eliminates baseline DC stress, and drastically reduces dynamic power consumption. Driven by a 2-cycle 7.4 Vpp CMOS pulser, the co-designed PMUT channel on an SOI substrate achieves a remarkably wide fractional bandwidth of 64% at a 5 MHz center frequency and delivers a robust transmitted acoustic pressure of 63.4 kPa at a 5 mm distance. Most significantly, the system’s imaging performance is rigorously validated through a multi-channel synthetic aperture ultrasound imaging experiment. Utilizing four transmit and five receive channels, the system successfully reconstructs the 4-cm B-mode contour of a screw phantom. This work experimentally validates the proposed bipolar multi-level driving scheme as a scalable, energy-efficient hardware foundation for future monolithic wearable ultrasound diagnostic platforms. PMUT; CMOS pulser; bipolar multi-level excitation; synthetic aperture imaging; MEMS ultrasound transducer; programmable pulse generator Tong Jin Yucheng Lin Hongyang Chen Xin Liu Hang Gao PUBLIC https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ dataset http://www.doi.org/10.1109/ACCESS.2026.3730140 Science Data Bank