Performance of a novel gating excitation circuit for an addressing ultrasonic sensor array

Abstract This study designed a gating excitation circuit for an addressing ultrasonic sensor array. The designed circuit comprises block-shaped lead zirconate titanate elements and has a modular design, maximizing the addressing excitation scale to 1024 (32 × 32) elements. A microcontroller generates a 32-bit addressing gating code sequence, which is then decoded by a shift register to generate a gating code signal. The rising and falling edges of this signal trigger the switching circuit to gate or isolate specific elements, thus achieving the addressing excitation of different array elements. The developed gating excitation circuit meets the excitation requirements of addressing ultrasonic sensor arrays with a central frequency range of 1–5 MHz. Within this frequency range, excitation pulses exhibit excellent gating and isolation performance, thereby ensuring the effective transmission and blocking of unipolar and bipolar pulses. Experimental results indicated that the designed circuit realized coded gating excitation for various elements in an addressing ultrasonic sensor array, thus effectively isolating pulse signal interference from other elements. The maximum on-state attenuation and off-state attenuation were 0.09 and 68.52 dB, respectively. Moreover, the designed circuit considerably reduces the circuit scale, minimizes the number of control signals, and exhibits high scalability. Overall, this design can serve as a valuable reference for the development of large-scale addressing ultrasonic sensor arrays.