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Teng-Chuan Cheng, Chih-Wei Chen Hsu, Hui-Chun Wang and Tsung-Heng Tsai
Department of Electrical Engineering, National Chung Cheng University, Taiwan

ABSTRACT
This paper proposed an oscillator-based ultrasonic sensor
interface that can be applied to intravascular applications. The
readout circuits are validated with a capacitive micromachined
ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) and a current-to-frequency chip. The
CMOS CMUTs are integrated with a current amplifier on the same
chip and the current-to-frequency chip provides the current-to-
frequency readout interface. Relaxation oscillators with injection
locking are employed to achieve low-power consumption. Also, the
time-based output signal can be further digitized with a time-to-
digital converter. Both chips are fabricated in a 0.35m CMOS
MEMS process technology. The CMUTs are designed with 1MHz to
4MHz cells for intravascular diagnosis applications. The current
amplifier consumes 281.7 μW and the power consumption of the
current-to-frequency circuits is 25.4 μW.

INTRODUCTION
The ultrasound image sensors are widely used in the surgical
applications to provide accurate visual guidance. Nowadays, there
are several methods utilized to minimize the trauma so that the
patients recover better after the surgery. For intravascular surgery,
catheters are widely utilized for diagnosis and treatment. The
catheter with ultrasound sensors can provide precise and clear image
to navigate the guide wire in the blurred blood vessel. Tiny yet
accurate ultrasonic sensors are required in this application. Many
capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducers (CMUTs) have
been developed over the past years for highly system integration to
meet the requirements [1][2]. As compared to the traditional
piezoelectric transducers, CMUT has several major advantages, such
as a wide temperature range, better mechanical impedance matching
and the possibility of system integrations for miniature medical
electronic devices. In this work, we adopted a standard CMOS
procedure to design and implement the CMUTs with integrated
readout circuits in the same chip.
Fig. 1 illustrates the proposed readout circuits for intravascular
medical ultrasound systems. The ultrasound probe is on the tip of the
catheter. Ultrasound reflections establish the images of the blood
vessel. Typically, three modes are available in the ultrasonic
diagnosis systems, A-mode, B-mode and M-mode. A-mode is the
amplitude of the reflected wave, which represents the intensity of the
reflected ultrasound waves. B-mode shows multiple combinations of
the intensity in the A-mode, which displays the acoustic impedance
of a two-dimensional cross-section of the vessels. And, M-mode
illustrates the A-mode images varying with time on the horizontal
axis. B-mode is clinically the most important diagnostic tool, but B-
mode requires converting the analog ultrasonic signals into their
digital forms for further digital signal processing.
FIGURE 1. THE PROPOSED OSCILLATOR-BASED ULTRASONIC SENSOR
INTERFACE FOR INTRAVASCULAR MEDICAL APPLICATIONS
Several techniques have been proposed to fabricate the
ultrasonic sensors and the electronic readout circuits [1]–[4].
In [2], CMUTs are integrated with capacitive sensing
amplifiers in a chip. Capacitive sensing amplifiers are
sensitive to process variations and usually need off-chip
calibrations. In [3], the front-end circuit and the analog-to-
digital converter (ADC) are integrated in the same chip, but
the ultrasonic transducer is not implemented. In [4], the
ultrasonic system was integrated in a chip including the ADCs.
However, ADCs in these ultrasound imaging systems
contribute a large portion of the overall power consumption.
As shown in Fig. 1, we proposed a current-to-frequency
readout by using relaxation oscillators with injection locking
to reduce the power consumption on quantizing the signal.
The reflective current signals are amplified by the current
amplifier and then processed by the current-to-frequency
circuits. The current-to-frequency readout interface converts
the ultrasound current signal into digital outputs. Therefore,
the capacitance variations induced by the reflective ultrasonic
waves are converted into period-modulated signals. In this
work, two relaxation oscillators are utilized for the proposed
conversion. The sensing oscillator is with injection locking [5]
by the induced current, and the other is the reference oscillator.
This time-modulated signal can be further digitized by a clock
counter. Therefore, the die area, power consumption and
circuit complexity could be reduced.

978-1-4673-9498-7/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE

 the openings for the etchant holes. The etchant holes are composed
of the metal-4, via-34 and metal-3. The air gap will be created after
metal-3 was removed. From (1), the initial capacitance value is about
30 fF for a single CMUT cell approximately. In order to increase the
sensitivity of the sensor, the CMUTs are designed with 9 cells in
parallel. The proposed CMUT structure can be suspended by a
simple post-processing step. The feature of the MEMS structure was
simulated by CoventorWare. Fig. 3(a) shows the frequency responses
of the proposed CMUT cells. It can be observed that the natural
frequency is nearby 3MHz and the bandwidth is from 1MHz to
4MHz. The induced CMUT current by the ultrasonic pulse is
illustrated in Fig. 3(b). The pulse length is about the reciprocal of the
bandwidth.
FIGURE 2. THE CROSS-SECTION VIEW OF THE PROPOSED CMUT THE PROPOSED READ-OUT CIRCUITS
STRUCTURE, (A) BEFORE POST PROCESSING (B) AFTER POST PROCESSING

Current Amplifier

Since the sensed biomedical signals are naturally with small

magnitudes, and the operation environment is potentially noisy. If the
sensing elements are connected to the amplifier using wire bonding,
the parasitic capacitances from the bond pads and the bonding wires
increase the total input capacitance, which degrades the noise
performance significantly [1]. The current amplifier is utilized and
integrated with the CMUT cells to minimize the parasitic capacitance
and enhance the sensitivity of the overall ultrasonic system. In this
work, the initial capacitance of the CMUT cells is 270 fF. The
induced current with the pressure from 0.01 MPa to 0.5 MPa ranges
from 3 nA to 11 nA. The induced current will then be amplified by
the current amplifier to increase the sensitivity of the readout circuit.
We adopted a simple architecture for the current amplifier to lower
the flicker noise from the transistors [6]. The architecture of current
amplifier is shown in Fig. 4. M1 and M2 provided an equivalent
resistance ro to transform ICMUT to influence the gate voltage of M4.
Consequently, this gate voltage of M4 will be further amplified by the
common-source amplifier. The output current Iinj of the current
amplifier can be expressed in (2).

g m 4 ro 3
I inj = I CMUT × ( ro1 // ro 2 ) × × Rout (2)
1 + gm4 R
FIGURE 3. SIMULATION RESULTS OF THE PROPOSED CMUTS, (A)
FREQUENCY RESPONSE (B) INDUCED CMUT CURRENT BY THE
In this work, the current amplifier provides a gain of 52dB to
ULTRASONIC PULSE
satisfy the overall system requirements. The induced current from
CMUTs after the current amplifier, Iinj, will be in the range of 1.1 A
DEVICE FABRICATION
to 5.43 A.
The CMUT structure can be equivalently modeled as a capacitor
[2]. When the transducer receives the ultrasonic signal, the
deformation of the top electrode will cause the variation of the
capacitance, which can be expressed in (1):

ε 0ε r ,air A
CS =
ε
(h1 + h2 ) r ,air + (g 0 − x ) (1)
ε r ,oxide

where 0 is the permittivity of vacuum, r,air is the permittivity of air,

r,oxide is the permittivity of the silicon oxide. A is the electrode area,
hn (n=1, 2) is the thickness of the dielectric, g0 is the initial air gap
and x is the displacement of the upper electrode. The detailed cross-
section plots of the CMUT structure is shown in Fig. 2. In this work,
the membrane is formed with the metal-4 and metal-2 layers, which
function as the upper and bottom electrodes. Moreover, metal-3 FIGURE 4. THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE CURRENT AMPLIFIER
forms the sacrifice layer to constitute the suspended structure. The
passivation layer would be covered on the top of the die except for
 FIGURE 6. THE PULSE MODULATOR, WHERE THE OSCILLATION
FREQUENCY OF THE SENSING OSCILLATOR IS INCREASED BY THE
FIGURE 5. THE CURRENT-MODE RELAXATION OSCILLATOR
INDUCED AC CURRENT

Relaxation Oscillator-Based I-F Converter

The current-mode relaxation oscillator-based current-to-

frequency (I–F) converter is shown in Fig. 5 [5]. The I–F
converter directly converts the ultrasound-induced ac current
signals into digital signals. This could save the die area, power
dissipation, and circuit complexity. The induced ac current is
injected into an oscillator-based I–F converter. The oscillation
frequency of a relaxation oscillator can be expressed in (3) [7].

IUP 1
F= = (3)
VTH ⋅ C R ⋅ C +τ

where  is the delay introduced by the clock buffer and the

switches. VTH is the reference voltage and IUP is the dc
charging current.

To simply the theoretical derivation, the injected ac current

Iinj is modeled as a damped sinusoidal current with frequency
i.Iinj=Iampe–tcos(it + k) , Considering the oscillation cycles
under ac current injection, it can be shown that [8]

dVc
C = IUP + I amp e-α t cos(ωi t + φk ) (4) FIGURE 7. SCHEMATIC OF INJECTION RING DOWN CURRENT RELAXATION
dt
OSCILLATOR

where Vc is the voltage on the capacitor C. i and k are the Fig. 6 shows the schematic of the pulse modulators [9]. The
input frequency and the kth phase, respectively. Iamp denotes its divided signals from the divider chain are used to create the pulses.
amplitude and  is the damping coefficient. The reference The outputs from the sensing relaxation oscillator are divided by 2N
current across the resistor R realizes a reference voltage VTH. while the outputs from the reference oscillation is divided by 2N-1. In
When the voltage Vc is larger than the reference voltage VTH, this work, N is designed to be 3. The divided pulses are further
the capacitor is reset and Vc becomes 0. Ignoring the time processed by a D-type filp flop. The pulse width equals the period of
required for resetting, the oscillation period with current the reference oscillator and the pulse period is twice the period of
injection, tH,i, can be shown as sensing oscillator. The frequency difference between the sensing
oscillator and the reference oscillator can be extracted. Furthermore,
the non-ideal effects introduced by the process, voltage, and
I amp ωi −α t H ,i
t H,i = R ⋅ C − ⋅ [e sin(ωi t H ,i + φk ) temperature variations of the relaxation oscillators can be reduced by
IUP ωi + α 2
2
using this differential readout architecture. Fig. 7 shows the circuit of
(5) the current injection relaxation oscillator. After the current
−α t H ,i
α ⋅e α amplification, the ultrasound-induced current Iinj is injected into MS1
− cos(ωi t H ,i + φk ) − sin φk + cos φk ]
ωi ωi and MS3, and then mirrored to MS2 and MS4, that varies the charging
current of the sensing relaxation oscillator and the output frequency
is increased.
It can be observed from (5) that the oscillation period tH,i becomes
smaller when the amplitude of the injected ac current is larger. As a
result, the oscillation frequency becomes higher.
 MEASUREMENT RESULTS TABLE I. PERFORMANCE SUMMARY AND COMPARISONS

We impose a waterproof package for CMUT chip and measured This work [1] [2] [3] [4]
in the underwater environment. JSR DPR300 ultrasonic pulser is Transducer CMUT CMUT CMUT PZT pMUT
used as the ultrasound emission source, and measured by a 2.25MHz 0.35m 0.35m 0.35m 0.35m 0.18m
Technology
probe. Fig. 8 shows the measurement results that the ultrasonic signal CMOS CMOS CMOS CMOS CMOS
increases the output frequency and generates the modulation Device
1-4 10-20 4-12.5 56 0.22
pulsewidth. The ultrasonic current received from the CMUTs is Bandwidth(MHz)
around 3 nA to 11 nA. After the current amplifier, the injection ac Amplifier
0.28 6.6 -
Power(mW)
current is about 1.1 A to 5.43 A. The implemented relaxation 270 0.335
Digitization
oscillator achieves the current-to-frequency conversion sensitivity of 0.025 N/A N/A
Power(mW)
10.77 kHz/A at 400 kHz. Fig. 9 shows the measured results of the
modulation and reference pulsewidth versus the amplitude of the
injection current. The modulation pulsewidth decreases linearly
when the injection current is within 1.1 A to 5.43 A. The power
consumption is 25.44 W. Table I provides the summary of the
overall performance of this work and comparisons with the prior arts
are provided as well. Fig. 10 shows chip photos of the proposed
ultrasonic readout interface system.

FIGURE 10. THE CHIP PHOTO OF THE PROPOSED OSCILLATOR-BASED

ULTRASONIC SENSOR INTERFACE (A) WATERPROOF PACKAGE CMUT CHIP
(B) CURRENT-TO-FREQUENCY CHIP

FIGURE 8. MEASURED RESULTS OF THE OSCILLATOR FREQUENCY
DIFFERENCE AND THE MODULATION PULSEWIDTH: (A) 2MHZ
ULTRASONIC CURRENT (B) OUTPUTS OF THE SENSING OSCILLATOR (C)
OUTPUTS OF THE SENSING OSCILLATOR
FIGURE 9. MEASURED MODULATION AND REFERENCE PULSEWIDTH
VERSUS THE INJECTION CURRENT
CONCLUSIONS
A low-power oscillator-based ultrasonic sensor interface for
intravascular medical applications is presented. The proposed system
integrates the CMUTs with the current amplifier and the current-to-
frequency converter on two chips. Both of them were fabricated in
TSMC 0.35m CMOS process. The CMUT chip consumes 281.72
W and the power consumption of current-to-frequency circuit is
25.44 W.
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