A Programmable CMOS Transceiver for Structural Health Monitoring

TL;DR

This paper presents a highly-integrated CMOS transceiver designed for active structural health monitoring, capable of actuating and sensing ultrasound waves with integrated signal processing features.

Contribution

It introduces a novel CMOS transceiver with integrated actuation, sensing, and signal processing for SHM, fabricated in 0.5 um CMOS technology.

Findings

Successfully localized damage in a test bed

Achieved low-distortion waveforms up to 12.7 Vpp

Demonstrated effective amplitude and phase extraction

Abstract

We describe a highly-integrated CMOS transceiver for active structural health monitoring (SHM). The chip actuates piezoelectric transducers and also senses ultrasound waves received by the same or another transducer. The transmitter uses an integer-N frequency synthesizer and pulse-width modulation (PWM) to generate low-distortion, band-limited waveforms up to 12.7 Vpp with center frequency from 0.1-2.75 MHz. The integrated offset-canceling fully-differential receiver has programmable gain and bandwidth, and uses quadrature demodulation to extract both amplitude and phase of the received waveforms for further signal processing. The transceiver was fabricated in a 0.5 um CMOS process and has been validated using (2D) damage localization on an SHM test bed.