Reconfigurable Ultrasonic Testing System Development Using Programmable Analog Front-End and Reconfigurable System-on-Chip Hardware

Pramod Govindan,Thomas Gonnot,Jafar Saniie,Vidya Vasudevan

doi:10.4236/cs.2015.67017

Abstract

Ultrasonic testing systems have been extensively used in medical imaging and non-destructive testing applications. Generally, these systems aim at a particular application or target material. To make these systems portable and more adaptable to the test environments, this study presents a reconfigurable ultrasonic testing system (RUTS), which possesses dynamic reconfiguration capabilities. RUTS consists a fully programmable Analog Front-End (AFE), which facilitates beamforming and signal conditioning for variety of applications. RUTS AFE supports up to 8 transducers for phased-array implementation. Xilinx Zynq System-on-Chip (SoC) based Zedboard provides the back-end processing of RUTS. The powerful ARM embedded processor available within Zynq SoC manages the ultrasonic data acquisition/processing and overall system control, which makes RUTS a unique platform for the ultrasonic researchers to experiment and evaluate a wide range of real-time ultrasonic signal processing applications. This Linux-based system is utilized for ultra-sonic data compression implementation providing a versatile environment for further development of ultrasonic imaging and testing system. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the capabilities of RUTS by performing ultrasonic data acquisition and data compression in real-time. Thus, this reconfigurable system enables ultrasonic designers and researchers to efficiently prototype different experiments and to incorporate and analyze high performance ultrasonic signal and image processing algorithms.

Highlights

Ultrasonic systems have been widely applied in industrial and medical fields
With ultrasound frequency ranging from 1-20 MHz, the data processing performance becomes critical to the system design
The performance of reconfigurable ultrasonic testing system (RUTS) has been evaluated by conducting experimental measurements to acquire ultrasonic

Summary

Introduction

Ultrasonic systems have been widely applied in industrial and medical fields. With ultrasound frequency ranging from 1-20 MHz, the data processing performance becomes critical to the system design. An efficient architecture is designed and implemented to meet the requirements of high performance ultrasonic signal processing applications This reconfigurable ultrasonic testing system (RUTS) supports dynamic reconfiguration of the analog front-end (AFE), as well as real-time computation and data transfer by using reconfigurable System-on-Chip (SoC) analog and digital components. This reflection termed as “echo” is digitized when channeled through a receiver, and is subsequently processed by a processing unit according to algorithms essential for imaging and evaluation of materials The features such as the center frequency of operation, incident beam pattern, signal conditioning and data conversion are to be tuned for optimal results based on the application and the target material being evaluated [2].

System Description

Yes No 80ns

Experimental Measurement Example

Signal Processing Example

Conclusion