The equipments designed and produced by the cell are two-fold:

1. parallel transmit RF coils to bring the degrees of freedom needed to overcome the RF field inhomogeneity and obtain uniform spin excitation in the brain, as well as phased receive arrays for optimal signal-to-noise ratio. As an example, two innovative 15-transmit/32-receive hybrid coils with two staggered rows of transceive dipoles, receive-only loops, and a patch to regain signal at the top of the head have been developed for both 7 T and 11.7 T. The 11.7 T coil was successfully used to produce the first ex and in vivo images of human and non-human primate brains in the frame of the Iseult project, opening the way to its exploitation for clinical and fundamental brain research.
2. multicoil shim arrays to homogenize the static magnetic field in the brain. Two 48-coil prototypes on 3 cylindrical layers whereby the coils' shape, size and location were optimized for human brain shimming in the supine position, and for macaque brain in the sphinx position, respectively, have been produced after the design process was patented.

MAIN TECHNICAL FEATURES

The electronics and instrumentation cell has its own facilities for maintaining and testing RF coils and other electronics hardware.

It features the following equipment:

• Spectrum analysers

• Vector Network Analysers

• Signal generators

• Oscilloscopes

• LCR meters

• PCB engraving machine