A Front-End Ultrasound Array Processor based on LVDS Analog-to-Digital Converters

This work presents a beamformer based on standard LVDS 12-bit analog-to-digital converters, which deliver the samples serially over a differential pair. The bit stream is synchronized and converted to a sequence of words in a FPGA. Beamforming is then carried out following the Progressive Focusing Correction Technique described in a previous work. The low pin count of serial converters and the FPGA ball grid array package allowed a high level of board integration. A scalable architecture allows many different configurations. Some of the possible applications are: Phased Array, Linear Scan, multi-channel Ultrasound systems, SAFT imaging and TOFD techniques. The configuration is changed by software or just installing more modules in a back-plane. This work describes the system architecture, analog and digital preprocessing and assesses the performance with experimental images from a test block and tissue phantoms.