Development of a 64-channel FPGA-based Scalable High-speed Real-time Data Acquisition and Storage System for Ultrasonic In-line Inspection Tools

This paper presents a 64 channel ultrasonic data acquisition and storage system for in-line inspection tools. According to the principle of scalability and reconfigurability, the system is based on modular design which consists of an ultrasound board with 64 channel of analog front-end pulser/receiver and high-speed digitizer, a storage board applied the high-speed and large-capacity NAND flash storage structure, a power conversion module and two back-planes. The system can be connected to the PC graphical user interface (GUI) to display real-time images through Gigabit Ethernet interface. In order to record raw data to study new data reduction methods and algorithms, the storage board uses multi-group and multi-channel NAND flash to achieve a parallel pipeline control method, which greatly improved the bandwidth and capacity performance of the storage system. The recorded data can be also downloaded to PC through Gigabit Ethernet interface for offline processing. Through the dynamic test, the system works normally and all the artificial defects on the test pipe can be detected and identified.