FPGA-Based 16-Channel Digital Ultrasound Receive Beamformer

Ultrasound imaging is an efficient, noninvasive, method for medical diagnosis. A commonly used approach to image acquisition in ultrasound system is digital beamforming. Digital beamforming, as applied to the medical ultrasound, is defined as phase alignment and summation of signals that are generated from a common source, by received at different times by a multi-elements ultrasound transducer. In this paper implementations of FPGA-based 16channel digital receive beamformer for ultrasound imaging was presented. The system consists of two 8 channels block to implement the 16-channel and the reconstructed line block. The beamfomer was done by using Xilinx system generator (Xilinx, Inc.) and MATLAB simulink (MathWorks, Inc.). The system was implemented in Virtex-5 FPGA. The total power consumption equals 7875.66 mW and the device utilizationnwas acceptable. The hardware architecture of the design provided flexibility for beamforming.