Hardware implementation of an ultrasonic beamformer

Abstract

This paper describes a FPGA based implementation of a Phase Shift Beamformer. To obtain high-resolution real-time images a fixed-point word-parallel pipelined CORDIC processor is used to compute the large number of complex multiplications needed. Analogue pre-processing amplifies, demodulates and samples outputs from a 16 sensor ultrasonic array. Suitable sensor geometries enable two and three dimensional images to be formed. The resulting scalable architecture could be utilised in a multitude of applications including medical imaging, virtual reality tracking, robot navigation and exploration.