Modular FPGA-based digital ultrasound beamforming

The evaluation of ultrasound system is measured by the development in analog and digital electronics. A modular field programmable gate array (FPGA)-based digital ultrasound beamforming is presented. The digital beamforming is implemented in Virtex-5 FPGA. The objective of this work is to develop a modular low-cost PC-based digital ultrasound imaging system that has almost all of its processing steps done on the PC side. The system consists of: two 8 channels block and reconstructed line block. The 8 channel block consist of: memory block to save the samples data after converted to fixed point type, delay block implemented by addressable shift register - the delay process is based on sampled delay focusing (SDF) - and M-code block applied the summation of each RF channel samples. The reconstructed block consists of pipelined adder to apply the summation of the two 8 channels blocks. The power consumption and device utilization was acceptable. Also it is possible to build 16-,32-,64-, and 128-channel beamformer. The hardware architecture of the design provided flexibility for beamforming.