News

Michele D'Urbino wins the A-SSCC Student Design Contest

• Monday, 13 November 2017

At the 2017 Asian Solid-State Circuits Conference (A-SSCC), Michele D'Urbino won the Student Design Contest with the paper "An Element-Matched Band-Pass Delta-Sigma ADC for Ultrasound Imaging". Michele worked in Michiel Pertijs' group at the Electronic Instrumentation Lab and obtained his MSc Degree earlier this year.

Michele developed an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) capable of digitizing the signals received by every individual element of a 2D ultrasound transducer array. This is an important step towards the realization of next-generation ultrasound probes with full in-probe digitization of the received echo signals. Michele’s ADC has an record-small element-matched size of 150 μm × 150 μm, which is realized by exploiting each piezo-electric transducer element not only as the signal source, but also as the electro-mechanical loop-filter of a continuous-time band-pass ΔΣ ADC.

A-SSCC is a major IEEE Conference on Integrated Circuit Design, and was held in Seoul on Nov. 6-8. At the conference, Michele gave a live demo of his prototype. This work is a collaboration with Oldelft Ultrasound, and was co-authored by Chao Chen, Zhao Chen, Zu-Yao Chang, Jacco Ponte, Boris Lippe and Michiel Pertijs.