Texas Instruments AFE5832 32-Ch Ultrasound Analog Front End

Texas Instruments AFE5832 32-Channel Ultrasound Analog Front End (AFE) is optimized for medical ultrasound systems. The AFE5832 provides high performance, low power, and a small package size resulting in a highly-integrated AFE solution. A multichip module (MCM) with three dies, two voltage-controlled amplifiers (VCA) dies, and one analog-to-digital converter (ADC) die. The VCA die has 16 channels, and the ADC die converts all of the 32 channels. Additionally, each channel in the VCA die is configured in either of two modes - the time gain compensation (TGC) mode or the continuous wave (CW) mode. The TGC mode results in each channel, including an input attenuator (ATTEN), a low-noise amplifier (LNA) with variable gain, and a third-order, low-pass filter (LPF). The CW mode includes each channel with an LNA with a fixed gain of 18dB and a low-power passive mixer with 16 selectable phase delays. These different phase delays can be applied to each analog input signal performing an on-chip beamforming operation. The ADC die has 16 physical ADCs, each converting two sets of outputs, one from each VCA die; thus, the device is configured to operate with a resolution of 12 bits or 10 bits.