A pre-calculation beamformer design based on FPGA for ultrasound SA imaging

The previous studies of real-time imaging process using directly delay calculation design on FPGA, because the limited number of memory on chip. In this paper, to achieve higher frequency, a look-up table which carries the distance information has been introduced in. As the operation frequency of memory on Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) can reach to as high as 400MHz, which is much higher than directly calculation. After the design of hardware language and compile, the performance of this beamformer was assessed on an Altera Stratix IV FPGA. The final performance shows the highest frequency is 300MHz. Experiment on total focus method SA imaging processing with 64 channels, our FPGA-based SA beamformer can achieve 32 frames per second (fps) processing (100MHz sample frequency, 16 bits resolution, frame size 256×256 pixels). According the experimental result, the beamformer can be used as real-time ultrasound processor modules.