Front-end electronics for cable reduction in Intracardiac Echocardiography (ICE) catheters

3-D imaging ICE catheters with large element counts present design challenges in achieving simultaneous data readout from all elements while significantly reducing cable count for a small catheter diameter. Current approaches such as microbeamformer techniques tend to rely on area and power hungry circuits, making them undesirable for ICE catheters. In this paper, a system which uses are an efficient real-time programmable on-chip transmit (TX) beamformer circuitry to reduce the cable count on the TX side and analog 8/1 Time Division Multiplexing (TDM) with Direct Digital Demodulation (DDD) to reduce the cable count on the receive (RX) side is presented.