Integrated 8 channel high intensity focused ultrasound beamforming driver

High intensity focused ultrasound technique is used to ablate pathological tissues, drug delivery, hemostasis, lithotripsy, thrombolysis. Due to the nature of HIFU, it has almost no side effects compared to other treatments. Focused ultrasound systems uses ultrasound waves and focuses them on a tiny fraction of a tissue and increases the temperature of focused area dramatically while maintaining low or no temperature rise in surrounding tissue. As the HIFU systems are advancing, their size is getting small. HIFU ablation systems can be used either invasive or non-invasive according to its purpose. For invasive HIFU ablation systems like ultrasound catheter ablation systems, size of the HIFU device is very important. In ultrasound catheter ablation systems, transducer arrays and their drivers are to be kept as small as possible due to size restrictions, while maintaining a reasonable number of channels for proper beamforming. In addition, these systems should be highly integrated with minimal power consumption for flexibility and functionality. Despite the size restrictions on these systems, such problems can be overcome by ASICs. In this work, we present a simple 8 channel high-frequency, high-voltage driver, together with its beamforming and control circuitry designed with AMS's H35 high voltage process. Keywords: beamforming, beamforming driver, high intensity focused ultrasound, HIFU, CMUT, very large scale integration, VLSI