A Hand-Held 190+190 Row–Column Addressed CMUT Probe for Volumetric Imaging

This paper presents the design, fabrication, and characterization of a 190+190 row-column addressed (RCA) capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) array integrated in a custom hand-held probe handle. The array has a designed 4.5 MHz center frequency in immersion and a pitch of 95 μm which corresponds to ≈ λ/4. The array has a 2.14 × 2.14 cm2 footprint including an integrated apodization scheme to reduce ghost echoes when performing ultrasound imaging. The array was fabricated using a combination of fusion and anodic bonding, and a deposit, remove, etch, multistep (DREM) etch to reduce substrate coupling and improve electrode conductivity. The transducer array was wire-bonded to a rigid-flex printed circuit board (PCB), encapsulated in room temperature vulcanizing (RTV) silicone polymer, electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielded, and mounted in a 3D-milled PPSU probe handle. The probe was characterized using the SARUS experimental scanner and 3D volumetric imaging was demonstrated on scatter and wire phantoms. The imaging depth was derived from tissue mimicking phantom measurements (0.5 dB MHz-1 cm-1 attenuation) by estimating the SNR at varying depths. For a synthetic aperture imaging sequence with 96+96 emissions the imaging depth was 3.6 cm. The center frequency measured from the impulse response spectra in transmit and pulse-echo was 6.0 ± 0.9 MHz and 5.3 ± 0.4 MHz, and the corresponding relative bandwidths were 62.8 ± 4.5 % and 86.2 ± 10.4 %. The fabrication process showed clear improvement in relative receive sensitivity and transmit pressure uniformity compared to earlier silicon-on-insulator (SOI) based designs. However, at the same time it presented yield problems resulting in only around 55 % elements with a good response.