Our breakthrough: advanced signal encoding for efficient, high-performance ultrasonics
CodeAcq technology is the result of over a decade of research into coded excitation. Our approach, developed by the NDE Group at Imperial College London, combines quasi-periodic phase encoding, hardware-efficient electronics, and on-board processing to create compact, low-power, and cost-effective systems that deliver high-performance signal acquisition.
Simple & Efficient Acquisition Hardware
Conventional Acquisition Architecture
Traditional systems rely on fast, high-energy transmission signals and receive amplifiers to maximise signal amplitude and maintain sufficient signal quality.
This involves generating high-voltage transmission amplitudes and rapidly switching them onto the transducer, via a transmit-receive (T/R) switch, to produce intense ultrasound bursts.
Returning ultrasound energy is then amplified by low-noise receivers and captured by the system. To protect the receiver components and prevent signal clipping, T/R isolation is needed when combining high-voltage transmit and sensitive receive paths.
While effective, this conventional approach results in complex electronic designs with numerous active components.
CodeAcq technology does things differently
We remove all active components traditionally used for energy delivery and receiver amplification, reducing the system to just a central controller and a single ADC per channel.
We use only low-voltage transmit signals which allows for direct coupling between the transmitter pins and the receive digitiser. This enables both simultaneous transmission and reception and our novel approach to phase modulations.
Our modulated signals are compressed on-device to recover high-quality ultrasonic outputs in a standard form, with the added benefit of precise transmit timing.
This combination of efficient signal encoding and a streamlined, low-power architecture enables smaller, more cost-effective systems while cutting development time and maintenance effort.
Phase Encoding for High Quality Signal Acquisition
CodeAcq exploits a fundamental principle of ultrasound acquisition: signal quality is proportional to transmitted energy.
- Traditional systems utilise this principle: they maximise their transmit amplitude & receiver amplification.
- CodeAcq takes an alternative approach: we maximise signal duration.
We match the total energy of conventional systems, without using high voltages, by sending multiple back-to-back low-energy pulses, extending transmit durations by thousands of times.
To ensure our long transmit durations do not interfere with the echo resolution – the minimum resolvable time between echoes – we utilise coded excitation. Specifically, we use advanced phase-modulations based on quasi-periodic TOP-CS sequences.
By altering the phase of each pulse in our transmit signal based on these sequences, we can perfectly compress (or remove – to isolate crosstalk) all useful information within a set measurement window – allowing us to recover traditional echoes without the traditional hardware complexity.
All signal demodulation happens on-device using our low-latency Sequence Filter algorithm, which compresses echoes with or without additional bandwidth filtering.
CodeAcq’s Ideal Signal Compression
CodeAcq’s Ideal Signal Cancellation
Maintaining Industry Standard Performance
With our low-power, code-enabled architecture, we have created CodeAcq modules that can meet or exceed industry standard signal quality in a more efficient, compact and cost-accessible package.
Even with transmit voltages under 3V, CodeAcq matches the signal quality of commercial systems using 200V pulses and 10dB receiver gain. This is all possible due to our simultaneous transmit-receive design and ultra-long signal encoding sequences.
Want to see the signal quality we can achieved? Contact Us to ask for a demo, or check out the representative signals shown below.
Immersion Application:
Using the CA1 in narrowband mode with a standard immersion transducer (from Olympus) to achieve almost 60dB SNR to the front wall entry echo.
Contact Application:
Using the CA1 in wideband mode with a standard contact transducer (from Olympus) to achieve >45dB first echo SNR with a high range resolution.
Multi-Channel Application:
Using a CA4 prototype with 4x standard contact transducers (from Olympus) to capture a full matrix of data from a single acquisition event.
Further Information
Want to learn more about the benefits of using CodeAcq technology, including how we can mitigate environmental noise sources and enable truly parallel multi-channel acquisitions? Contact Us to arrange a call.