A Transceiver for NMR Field Probes Integrated in a Low-Power CMOS Process

This paper presents a CMOS transceiver for field monitoring in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanners. The integrated circuit (IC) is optimized for usage in magnetic field strengths of 3T and 7T. The transceiver integrates a transmitter capable of exciting a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) field probe up to a peak-to-peak voltage of 143V thanks to a resonant tank. This NMR-on-a-chip also implements a low-IF quadrature receiver. The receiver, including transimpedance amplifiers (TIA) and measurement output buffers, consumes only 14.1mW. The measured signals acquired in a full-body scanner result in an input-referred noise of ${\text{390pV/}}\sqrt {{\text{Hz}}} $ owing to a resonant network passively amplifying the probe signal to the low-noise amplifier (LNA) input. The overall transceiver is integrated into a 65nm CMOS process covering a total area of 1.5mm<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup>.