Ultrasonic Signal Acquisition and Processing platform based on Zynq SoC

Abstract

Ultrasonic testing systems have been widely used in medical and industrial fields, demanding strict requirements for processing speed and re-configurability of the hardware system. This paper presents a prototype of a reconfigurable, high performance, low cost and real-time Ultrasonic Signal Acquisition and Processing (USAP) platform based on Zynq System-on-Chip (SoC). The USAP platform consists of five major components: Multi-level voltage power supply; High voltage pulse generation; Ultrasonic signal acquisition; Sampling control unit and Digital signal processing module. The system uses Xilinx Zynq SoC as main processor and controller. It combines both ARM processor and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) on the same chip, which makes the system capable of doing complex system configuration and performing high speed data processing. With this arrangement, the developed system is highly reconfigurable, where software and hardware configuration can be changed on both ARM and FPGA. This paper presents a system design flow of a complete ultrasonic testing system which is capable of acquiring ultrasonic data and performing advanced signal processing algorithms in real-time.