34.1 An 8960-Element Ultrasound-on-Chip for Point-of-Care Ultrasound

Abstract

Point-of-care ultrasound (POCUS) is transforming healthcare worldwide as a diagnostic tool with the potential to significantly reduce the delay between symptom onset and initiation of therapy. Conventional POCUS systems are based on piezoelectric transducers and cable-connected electronics, which require a costly manufacturing process and usually come with an undesirably limited channel count. Such devices typically serve a specific subset of clinical applications, as imaging at different body parts calls for different ultrasound frequencies that are beyond the bandwidth of a single piezoelectric transducer. To enable whole-body imaging, multiple probes with different frequencies, apertures and beamforming (BF) methods are generally required. This further limits the affordability and accessibility of POCUS. Recent advances in micromachined ultrasound transducers (MUTs) have offered an alternative path to addressing these challenges. However, previous attempts to integrate MUTs with chips have been incomplete, neither solving the integration problem [1, 2] nor achieving full ultrasound processing capabilities [3, 4].