A FPGA/DSP design for real-time fracture detection using Low Transient Pulse

This work presents the hardware and software architecture for the detection of fractures and edges in materials. While the detection method is based on the novel concept of Low Transient Pulse (LTP), the overall system implementation utilizes two microelectronics technologies: Digital Signal Processor (DSP) and Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The DSP carries out the analysis of the received signal at a much lower rate hence can accommodate a large number of signal channels. The FPGA runs at a higher frequency (62.5MHz) to generate the LTP signal and to calculate the envelope of the received signal (sampled at 1MHz). This research elaborates on designing a Quadrature AM (QAM) demodulator on the FPGA for the received signal from the ultrasound and for the detection of the presence of edges/fracture on the test materials. The complete system is designed and optimized in a high level MatlabSimulink fixed point simulation. Different sub-blocks are then implemented and optimized on the FPGA where efforts are taken to maintain its accuracy with the simulated model. In this work, the technology is applied to determine the location of the Sawbone plate edges based on the received signals which are then passed through a QAM demodulator in the FPGA and a peak detector in the DSP to calculate the echo peak times.