A High Speed Digital Ultrasonic Flaw Detector Based on PC and USB

In order to meet the need of high speed data transfer in ultrasonic inspection nowadays, a PC and USB based high speed digital ultrasonic flaw detector is introduce. The technology of USB (universal serial bus), especially USB2.0 facilitates the connection of PC to peripheral, and accelerates data transfer. By using the USB interface the speed of data transfer is significantly increased, which solved the real-time problem. At the same time, the PC can control the testing process, analyse the echo signal, and realize automatic testing. The use of FPGA (Field-Programmable Gate Array) decreases the volume of the circuit, improves the speed of data sampling and processing, increases the reliability, shortens the developing time, and at the same time makes modifications made to the system easier. In this paper a digital ultrasonic flaw detector specialize in inspecting rail weld, based on PC, using USB2.0 and FPGA technique is presented. The design of FPGA and the use of GPIF (general programming interface) USB transfer mode are introduced in detail.