Design of a low power time-gain-compensation amplifier for a 2D piezoelectric ultrasound transducer

In this paper, a programmable time-gain-compensation amplifier dedicated to a 2D piezoelectric ultrasound transducer is presented. It uses an open-loop amplifier structure consisting of a voltage-to-current converter and a current-to-voltage converter. The circuit has been designed in a standard 0.35-μm CMOS process. Simulation and measurement results show that gains of 0dB, 12dB, 26dB and 40dB can be achieved for input signals centered at 6MHz with 80dB dynamic range (100μV to 1V). The measured gain errors at 6MHz are below 1dB for all gain settings. The amplifier consumes only 130μW when driving a 250fF load.