A novel FPGA based platform for ultrasound power measurement

Ultrasound power meter is widely used in health care, educational and industrial institutions. It is used to measure the power output of ultrasound machine for diagnostic, therapeutic and non-destructive testing purposes. The current ultrasound machine is high cost and does not have further data processing for analysis. In order to reduce the cost of data processing unit and enable further analysis, a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) based ultrasound processing platform has been proposed. This platform is able to process the data from two polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF) sensors and one temperature sensor. It is prepared to measure the ultrasound frequency from 500 kHz to 10 MHz with temperature range from 10°C to 50°C and power range from 1 mW/cm² up to 10 W/cm2 (based on formula, the resolution is 0.87 mW/cm²). For the further analysis, a graphical user interface (GUI) has been developed. The GUI receives the data from the ultrasound processing unit through a serial communication port and display the result in the graph. This FPGA has been tested and can be used as platform for ultrasound power meter. Test result shows that the platform is able to process 10 μs ultrasound data with 20 ns time-domain resolution and maximum amplitude of 2 Vp with 0.12 mVpp resolution then display these waveform and calculation result in the GUI.