Koninklijke Philips Corporation N.v.

Maxim Integrated Products, Inc.

Ron Gatzke

Jean-Marc Roger Mourant

James Francis Imbornone

John Frank Scampini

Theodore Philip Fazioli

Analog beamformers for continuous wave ultrasonic receivers, typically realized in integrated circuit form and using a direct quadrature baseband conversion architecture for CW Doppler to eliminate a second down conversion mixer and second synthesizer. The beamformers use integrated mixers and LO's for phase steering, and dedicated ring counters for each channel for lower noise. Input filtering may be provided with switchable RF input low pass filters. The integrated circuit includes the ultrasound signal VGA and beamformer on the same chip. An auxiliary channel may be included for a self-test mode. Also a programmable bit soft shutdown feature, programmable via the serial port, allows disabling individual channels. Various other features are disclosed including cascading of multiple integrated circuits for a much greater number of channels.

Analog beamformers for continuous wave ultrasonic receivers

A Doppler receiver has a wide dynamic range and operates in a differential mode. In one embodiment, the invention is a wide dynamic range continuous wave (CW) Doppler receiver, comprising a differential fixed frequency output mixer configured to receive a radio frequency (RF) input signal and supply a differential signal output; a differential fixed frequency bandpass filter coupled to the differential fixed frequency output mixer and configured to provide a fixed frequency output; an in-phase mixer and a quadrature-phase mixer, each configured to receive a differential signal output of the differential fixed frequency bandpass filter; at least one in-phase filter configured to receive the output of the in-phase mixer and supply a filtered in-phase signal; at least one quadrature-phase filter configured to receive the output of the quadrature-phase mixer and supply a filtered quadrature-phase signal; and an analog-to-digital converter configured to receive the filtered in-phase signal and the filtered quadrature-phase signal and supply a corresponding in-phase digital output and a corresponding quadrature-phase digital output, the outputs of the analog-to-digital converter supplied to a memory element.

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Lexington, MA, United States of America

Ron Gatzke