A high-frequency and high-frame-rate ultrasound imaging system design for capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer arrays on an FPGA evaluation board

Dynamic receive beamforming (DRBF) is challenging for FPGA-based ultrasound (US) imaging because it is computationally intense. Work has been done to either simplify the delay calculation or precalculate the delays and store them on the FPGA. The former sacrifices image quality and the latter is challenged by limited memory resource. In this work, we report on the design of an US imaging system for capacitive micromachined ultrasonic transducer (CMUT) arrays implemented on an FPGA evaluation board. The system features high frequency, high framerate, and full DRBF for every pixel.