An optimized ultrasound digital beamformer with dynamic focusing implemented on FPGA

We present a resource-optimized dynamic digital beamformer for an ultrasound system based on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA). A comprehensive 64-channel receive beamformer with full dynamic focusing is embedded in the Altera Arria V FPGA chip. To improve spatial and contrast resolution, full dynamic beamforming is implemented by a novel method with resource optimization. This was conceived using the implementation of the delay summation through a bulk (coarse) delay and fractional (fine) delay. The sampling frequency is 40 MHz and the beamformer includes a 240 MHz polyphase filter that enhances the temporal resolution of the system while relaxing the Analog-to-Digital converter (ADC) bandwidth requirement. The results indicate that our 64-channel dynamic beamformer architecture is amenable for a low power FPGA-based implementation in a portable ultrasound system.

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