UltraLight: An ultrafast imaging platform based on a digital 64-channel ultrasound probe

Digital ultrasound probes include the entire analog frontend in their enclosing and are equipped with a standard digital link. This enables to build very cost-effective ultrasound systems as they can be simply connected to a commodity device, such as a desktop PC, tablet or smartphone, running an ultrasound imaging application. Up to now, digital probes have been mainly demonstrated for low-end ultrasound applications and are currently limited to a small number of frontend channels (typically 16). In addition, the available bandwidth at the digital interface (less than 10 Gb/s) limits these devices only to basic imaging modalities. In this work, we present an imaging platform built with a digital 64-channel ultrasound probe that supports ultrafast imaging. Our digital probe, called LightProbe, utilizes a 64-element phased array without multiplexing and incorporates a 64-channel 100 Vpp TX/RX stage providing a sample rate up to 32.5 MS/s @ 12bit. The probe features an optical link interface achieving 25Gb/s on a standard fiber cable. A Xilinx Artix 7 FPGA is integrated in the probe to manage the optical interface and to provide a high-degree of configurabilty. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first digital probe capable of compounded plane wave imaging. We capture plane waves with peak and average rate of 4.9 kHz and 2kHz respectively, with a peak link load of 15.36 Gb/s, while consuming just 9.25 W.