A Five-Level, 1-MHz, Class-D Ultrasonic Driver for Guided-Wave Transducer Arrays

This paper presents the design, characterization, and testing of an ultrasonic transducer driver capable of arbitrary waveform generation with a bandwidth of up to 1 MHz and an output range of ±96 V. The architecture is derived from bridged class-D switching amplifiers and has a five-level power stage. The proposed device was implemented with eight synchronized channels and an all-digital control circuitry to transmit guided-wave ultrasound signals using custom piezoelectric multi-element array transducers, allowing programmable mode selectivity.