Embedded high-speed data acquisition and digital signal processing platform for digital ultrasound imaging

An embedded high-speed data acquisition and digital signal processing platform for digital ultrasound imaging is presented. In this work, the data acquisition and the digital signal processing algorithms are implemented on a low cost Xilinx Spartan 3E FPGA (field programmable gate array) chip. Echo signals received from the analog front-end are directed to the digital beam former on the FPGA. The A-scan line is obtained from the beam former which is then passes through a maximally flat FIR Hilbert transformer to yield a single side band of the A-scan to be band pass filtered. In order to achieve high speed acquisition compression techniques are involved. Large amounts of data are sent to the PC via high speed USB 2.0 interface. The huge amount of data sent to the PC allows for the employment of the prototype in developing ultrasound imaging devices with advancements of real time processing.