Single-chip pulse programmer for magnetic resonance imaging using a $32-bit$ microcontroller Available to Purchase

A magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) pulse programmer has been developed using a single-chip microcontroller $(ADμC7026)$⁠. The microcontroller includes all the components required for the MRI pulse programmer: a $32-bit$ RISC CPU core, $62kbytes$ of flash memory, $8kbytes$ of SRAM, two $32-bit$ timers, four $12-bit$ DA converters, and $40bits$ of general purpose I/O. An evaluation board for the microcontroller was connected to a host personal computer (PC), an MRI transceiver, and a gradient driver using interface circuitry. Target (embedded) and host PC programs were developed to enable MRI pulse sequence generation by the microcontroller. The pulse programmer achieved a (nominal) time resolution of approximately $100ns$ and a minimum time delay between successive events of approximately $9μs$⁠. Imaging experiments using the pulse programmer demonstrated the effectiveness of our approach.