Design and evaluation of reconfigurable ultrasonic testing system

Abstract

Ultrasonic data acquisition systems used in the medical imaging and nondestructive testing applications have critical requirements in order to be capable of evaluating and prototyping ultrasound applications. In this paper, a system-on-chip (SoC) based reconfigurable ultrasonic testing system (RUTS) is developed for implementation of high-speed ultrasonic signal processing algorithms. RUTS comprises of a fully reconfigurable analog front-end (AFE) sub-system for efficient data acquisition, and a Xilinx Zynq SoC module for dynamic feature control. Computationally intensive ultrasonic signal processing algorithms are implemented on Zynq SoC using hardware-software co-design methodologies. AFE supports up to 8 transducers for phased-array implementation. This Linux-based system is analyzed for ultrasonic data compression implementation providing a very versatile environment for further ultrasound system development and research work.