Reconfigurable accelerator design platform for ultrasonic signal processing and imaging applications

Ultrasonic testing and imaging systems have evolved from a basic single transducer system to arrays capable of 3-dimensional scans. These systems need to be flexible and also reconfigurable in order to acquire and process a vast amount of data. The system must also allow for a variety of parameters like the data acquisition rate, signal lengths and processing characteristics which need to be reconfigurable for adaptability to different applications. This study presents a reconfigurable hardware/software co-design system including specific hardware accelerators to acquire and perform ultrasonic signal processing efficiently. For this study, the architecture of the developed ultrasonic system is comprised of two different functional components. One component is specially designed to process the data while the other component gathers, compresses and transfers data which can later be restored and analyzed. For data transfer a simple and consequently efficient real-time operating system and Ethernet connective is developed. This is all implemented on the ZEDBoard Zynq SoC for maximum flexibility and performance. The data handling component is built with support for gathering, compressing, reconstructing, and transferring data to other platforms via Ethernet communication. The different variations of the designs allow the system designers the choice of applying the best solution for their specific applications.