Microscope electronics system

Acoustic microscope systems are high frequency, focused, micro-scanning and expensive. Whilst the performance demands on the transducer and lens is high new materials and machining technologies are enabling high frequency transducers to be more easily realized. A factor limiting use of microscope systems is the slow frame rate due to the micro-scanning needs. New transducer concepts reduce these needs e.g. annular arrays which provide near ideal axial focusing. However the cost of commercial capture (2 channel adc @ 2GSample/sec ~$15K), power amplifier (1 channel 1GHz with powerdown ~$4K) and signal generation modules results in high system costs even for a small number of channels. In this paper we summarize the performance of an annular array system we have developed.