Going back to the late 1970's, a company by the name of 2nd Foundation developed a mecanical sector scanner which was purchased by GEMS. The probe on this system held a scanning wheel with four inward looking transducers and featured two ports, wide and narrow, for imaging abdominal and cardiac respectively. The four transducer design reduced the rotational speed needed for acceptable frame rate. The acoustic beam from the transducers was steered by reflecting the beams of off acoustic mirrors, one in the narrow port case and two in the wide port case, this cut down the penetration out of the wide port. A young upstart (yeah, it was me) suggested forgoing the wide port mirrors and firing outward looking transducers to gain extra penetration, six months later an updated design was released with two outward looking and two inward looking transducers (pictured). Further performance gains were realized by offsetting the frequencies of the transducers to more optimally meet their imaging goals. The next sector devices I encountered were composite annular arrays at Diasonics where I engineered a major reworking of the devices.
A sample of a cost reducing flex circuit phased array design at GEMS circa 1987. The mass termination of the flex circuit and larger cable wiring area trimmed several hours off the construction time compared to wirebonding to the PZT and cable attachment to a subminiature PCB.
Cost of producing the 64 element phased arrays was eventually brought into the $200 range, cabling ran around $800, making for a $1000 probe.
One of the neat features of the GE phased array package at the time was its compact size which could be readily incorporated into various probe packages. Thus was born perhaps the first electronic array transvaginal probes. The business end of the prototypes are pictured here. They made quite a hit in the invitro fertilization crowd, circa 1985. Transrectal probes followed as did the
suprasternal cardiac access probe pictured to the left. It was based on a disc shaped phased array(not annular) transducer developed in earlier years for a burr hole probe. Eventually a small number of trans- esophegeal probes were produced prior to the plant being shut down in late 1988. This is a life size picture of the transesophageal scan head. Nestled within is a 64 element 7 MHz pased array. These small arrays had a significant
delamination problem. I found a key process step which helped control this problem which resulted in easily doubling yields, reducing scrap by six figures and enabling eight figure profitability for the department. This process also helped level out the yeilds for the other transducers in the line.
In March 1991 I joined Diasonics for the startup of their composite array probe line. In three and one half years six probes were introduced. At this time I left the company to explore other oppurtunities
This move lead to my creating the XdcrLab (Transducer Lab) to offer my experience and knowledge in filling your needs from specialty transducer fabrication to an entire transducer production facility.
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