Pipelined high precision beamforming delay calculator for ultrasound imaging

Ultrasound Imaging is one of the most widely used medical imaging methods, and beamforming is the enabling technology of ultrasound imaging, which directly influences the image quality. The critical problem of modern ultrasound imaging system is generating high resolution images at high frame rate. To solve this problem, real-time high precision beamforming delay parameters must be generated. This paper presents the design and implementation of a pipelined high precision beamforming delay calculator for ultrasound imaging, which uses 10-stage pipelined CORDIC (Coordinate Rotation Digital Computer) processor to perform fully pipelined architecture. The presented delay calculator calculates delay parameters with high precision, which can greatly improve the image quality. And fully pipelined architecture can also provide high frame rate. The design has been synthesized for an Altera Arria-II GX FPGA with speed grade 4. A delay calculator requires about 3,238 out of 50,600 available ALUTs (6.4%), and a 64-channel dual-beam system needs 24 such delay calculator modules. The delay calculators run in parallel, and one of them can generate 300 million delay parameters per second.