Design of a Digital Receive Beamformer ASIC Based Ultrasound Imaging System Prototype

This paper presents the design of an eight-channel digital receive beamformer application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) based ultrasound (US) imaging system. The designed prototype system supports up to 64 transmit and 16 receive channels. ASIC-based 16-channel US transceiver board is designed for frontend processing, and for backend processing Intel (R) Core (TM)-i5 based PC is employed. The transceiver board employs two ASICs for digital receive beamforming and a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) for transmit beamforming and system control. The necessary power supplies for the transceiver board are provided by a custom designed and developed high voltage (HV) and low voltage (LV) power supply board. The transceiver board performs the frontend processing like transmit beamforming, control, analog signal conditioning and digital receive beamforming. The received beamformed data are directly transferred to a host PC via the Gigabit Ethernet interface for image formation, post-processing and display. The ASIC-based system developed can provide real-time B-mode imaging with a maximum frame rate of 102 fps with a field of view (FOV) of 90(degrees). These results indicate that the ASIC-based US imaging systems can provide better processing capability and performance.