Real Time Synthetic Aperture and Plane Wave Ultrasound Imaging with the Xilinx VERSAL™ SIMD-VLIW Architecture

A decade of technological improvement in System-On-Chip (SoC) integrated with Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) have made it possible to successfully productize traditional ultrasound systems, especially portable ones. However, advanced modalities like Synthetic Aperture (SA) and Plane Wave (PW) Ultrafast imaging with their many advantages have not been targeted because of the sheer computing performance required for the ultrasound pipelines in real-time. Very large vector processers (DSPs and GPUs) solves some of the problems, but it runs into traditional scaling challenges due to inflexible, inefficient memory bandwidth usage and high-power consumption. Traditional FPGA solutions provide a programmable memory hierarchy, but the hardware development flow has been a barrier to broad, high-volume adoption. The need for low power and high performance must be explored beyond the conventional “one size fits all” CPU scalar processing solution for Ultrafast imaging to be a viable option. This paper presents a new technology called `Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform' (ACAP) on Xilinx's Versal™ system, which has the capability of making real time SA and PW Ultrafast imaging possible.