Reconfigurable and programmable System-On-Chip hardware platform for real-time ultrasonic testing applications

Present day ultrasonic signal processing applications such as medical imaging and non-destructive testing has stringent requirements on low cost and portability to provide high quality diagnostics and characterization at real-time pace. Advancements in the field of digital signal processing, embedded computing, and semiconductor technologies, have significantly assisted ultrasound researchers in the development of low-cost, portable, and computationally efficient systems. In this study, a reconfigurable and programmable ultrasonic testing system (RPUTS) is designed and developed to effortlessly test and evaluate a wide variety of ultrasonic signal processing applications. RPUTS integrates a reconfigurable Analog Front-End (AFE) which supports up to 8 transducers suitable for phased-array implementations. The back-end processing is provided by Xilinx Zynq System-on-Chip (SoC) which includes a powerful embedded ARM processor. Zynq SoC manages the overall system configuration as well as the execution of the signal processing algorithms. This study demonstrates the capabilities of RPUTS by realizing a complete ultrasonic testing system which acquires ultrasonic data and performs high-speed 3D compression on the acquired data at real-time rate.