An IEEE single-precision arithmetic based beamformer architecture for phased array ultrasound imaging system

Abstract

Ultrasound imaging is a largely used medical imaging system as it is safe, non-invasive, and capable of real-time imaging. In ultrasound imaging, different beamforming methods are used to obtain the image of the field of view. The image quality largely depends on the type of beamforming used in ultrasound imaging. To make the ultrasound imaging system portable, beamforming system needs to be implemented as compact hardware architecture. Dynamic focusing and adaptive apodization are used in beamforming systems to generate high-quality ultrasound images, however, their implementation into the hardware requires large hardware resource which consumes high power. This paper presents the implementation of a compact receive beamformer architecture using a hardware-efficient dynamic delay calculator, an IEEE single-precision arithmetic based adaptive apodization system architecture and a focusing mechanism. The proposed beamformer provides real-time beamforming output which can be used to display high quality ultrasound images. Field-II toolbox is used to simulate and verify the beamformer output. The proposed beamformer consumes 1370k NAND-2 gate equivalent logic resources in UMC 90 nm CMOS standard cell library.

Keywords

• Beamformer
• Ultrasound imaging system
• Apodization
• Delay calculator
• IEEE single precision arithmetic