Single-FPGA, scalable, low-power, and high-quality 3D ultrasound beamformer
We present an efficient FPGA architecture suitable for a medical 3D ultrasound beamformer. We tackle the delay calculation bottleneck, which is the heart and the most critical part of the beamformer, by proposing a computationally efficient design that is able to perform volumetric real-time beamforming on a single-chip FPGA. The design has been demonstrated for a 32×32-channel receive probe, and we extrapolated the requirements of the architecture for 80×80 channels.