Novel Bandwidth Expander Supported Power Amplifier for Wideband Ultrasound Transducer Devices.

Ultrasound transducer devices have their own frequency ranges, depending on the applications and specifications, due to penetration depth, sensitivity, and image resolution. For imaging applications, in particular, the transducer devices are preferable to have a wide bandwidth due to the specific information generated by the tissue or blood vessel structures. To support these ultrasound transducer devices, ultrasound power amplifier hardware with a wide bandwidth can improve the transducer performance. Therefore, we developed a new bandwidth expander circuit using specially designed switching architectures to increase the power amplifier bandwidth. The measured bandwidth of the power amplifier with the help of the bandwidth expander circuit increased by 56.9%. In addition, the measured echo bandwidths of the 15-, 20-, and 25-MHz transducer devices were increased by 8.1%, 6.0%, and 9.8%, respectively, with the help of the designed bandwidth expander circuit. Therefore, the designed architecture could help an ultrasound system hardware with a wider bandwidth, thus supporting the use of different frequency ultrasound transducer devices with a single developed ultrasound system.