This paper presents a low-power hardware architecture that facilitates the simultaneous
transmission and reception of ultrasonic signals when using coded excitations for ultrasonic
measurements. With this architecture, long pseudo-periodic coded excitations, which have
previously been unsuitable for pulse-echo measurements, can be used to produce high Signalto-Noise Ratio (SNR) results without an increase in signal dead-zone and without introducing
filter artefacts within a set measurement window. We show that a low-power system (±2 V
peak excitation amplitude without receiver amplification) utilising such coded excitations can
achieve the same level of performance as a conventional high-power system (−200 V peak
excitation amplitude with 15 dB receiver amplification) by producing 45 dB SNR measurements
whilst maintaining a high Pulse Repetition Frequency (PRF) of ≥0.5 kHz. The use of pseudoperiodic sequences to produce quasi-orthogonal sequence families is then demonstrated to allow
an arbitrary number of acquisition channels to be used simultaneously with complete crosstalk
removal within a set measurement window. Therefore, the work presented here can open the
door for the development of simplified low-power multi-channel acquisition systems without
sacrificing system performance.