A highly-integrated CMOS transceiver for active structural health monitoring

This paper introduces a highly-integrated CMOS transceiver for a variety of active structural health monitoring (SHM) applications. This proposed chip can generate the electrical actuation signals for piezoelectric transducers as well as provide broadband low-noise reception for reflected or transmitted waves on the same or another transducer. The transmitter can generate low-distortion waveforms up to 12.7 V_pp with a center frequency in the ~100 kHz to 1 MHz range. The waveform is synthesized using filtered pulse-width modulation (PWM). The integrated fully-differential receiver is capable of extracting both amplitude and phase information from the reflected or transmitted waveforms for further signal processing. In this paper, we mainly focus on the programmable transmitter design. The transceiver is currently being fabricated in a 0.5 μm CMOS process; an earlier version has been experimentally validated on an SHM test bed based on the proposed fractal analysis.