SBIR-STTR Award

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project will develop an advanced ultrasonic beamforming Application Specific Integrated Circuit (ASIC) chip. The beamformer ASIC will enable three-dimensional imaging to be employed in intra-cardiac catheter imaging, surgical guidance of instruments, and tumor ablation. The level of integration, frequency of operation, and scalability proposed in this project have never been attempted. The purpose of the Phase I effort is determine the feasibility of this ASIC. To accomplish this task: (1) a finite element substrate noise model will be developed and used to evaluate the effect of noise on signal integrity; (2) the signal path will be modeled using a MATLAB-based architectural simulator embodying the exact numerical and sampling rate representations of the ASIC; and (3) a partial circuit design of the chip will be obtained in preparation for later stages of development in Phase II. Diagnostic ultrasound is used to non-invasively and non-destructively investigate both living and inanimate objects, spanning applications from diagnostic obstetrics to defect detection in aerospace structures. The fundamental function shared by all imaging ultrasound machines is beamforming. The beamforming ASIC proposed in this Phase I SBIR effort will be developed with the explicit purpose of exceeding the technical requirements of most applications in both medical and non-destructive evaluation. The significant performance advantages featured by the ASIC will make it an attractive choice to instrument makers

This SBIR Phase II research project strives to develop an Advanced Ultrasonic Beamformer that is unparalleled in its scalability and signal processing features. The ultrasonic beamformer architecture will be unique in its breadth of features. The architecture was developed as the superset of features across several fields including medical imaging, medical therapy, bone density measurement, vascular imaging, and materials characterization. This approach provides each field with an instrument capable of operating outside the normal performance envelope, thereby presenting opportunities for the development of new uses of ultrasound. The benefits of this array include better frame rates, crisper images, and more accurate surgery. The higher frequencies used in materials characterization, when brought to medical imaging, will allow array transducer to be used where only conventional, single element probes could used in the past, for example in intra-cardiac imaging for surgical instruments, and also for tumor ablation. By design, the proposed architecture encompasses the abilities of many different fields. Each field then enjoys performance capabilities beyond what is normally available, providing a general-purpose tool for research