Highly Scalable and Flexible FPGA Based Platform for Advanced Ultrasound Research

We present a new generation of our highly scalable and flexible ultrasound research platform for sonar, medical and high frequency applications that can be used to develop new technologies and integrate them to real life applications based on its cost efficient system design. The innovation in this platform is its scalability up to 128 channels and 500 MHz digitalization for all kinds of applications ranging from low frequency sonar applications to high frequency biomedical imaging (100 kHz - 100 MHz transducer frequency) while using one single main board mounted with application specific frontend boards that can be installed for different sampling rates, memory or processing requirements. The system is designed for simultaneous control of 128 channels and up to 1024 transducer elements with multiplexer. Based on a Virtex-6 FPGA and MicroBlaze soft processors the system is highly flexible in terms of waveform generation, modern beamforming programming and signal processing possibilities. The received data can be accessed as single element channel data and transferred to a PC via Gigabit Ethernet or PCI-Express where beamforming can be done on a graphics processor (GPU). Powerful online and offline software packages including unique filtering interfaces and closed-loop control are available to process, analyze and visualize the data. The system has been applied to the investigation of plane-wave medical imaging methods and has been used as a multi beam echo sounder (MBES) with a 128 element 1 MHz sonar antenna. Both applications demonstrate the system performance to be sufficient to meet real time and signal quality demands for modern ultrasound imaging. The computational power of current generation consumer graphics adapter allows beamforming, real time processing and visualization of ultrasound channel data at interactive rates of more than 30 fps.