Assessing the Area/Power/Performance Tradeoffs for an Integrated Fully-Digital, Large-Scale 3D-Ultrasound Beamformer


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Date

2014

Publication Type

Conference Paper

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yes

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Abstract

High-frame-rate and high-resolution 3D medical ultrasound imaging imposes high requirements on the involved processing hardware. Several thousands of analog signals need to be processed in many steps to obtain a final image. Fully digital beamforming makes it possible to achieve high image quality coupled with extreme flexibility. Unfortunately, digital beamforming imposes staggering requirements on main memory bandwidth caused by the loading of off-chip stored beamforming delays. In this paper we present the first fully-digital integrated beamformer that is able to compute 269.3M focal points (FP) per second from 10 000 receive channels, and which does not require off-chip main memory. This is enabled by our novel delay approximation circuit that exploits temporal correlation between subsequent computations and thereby allows to compute the delays for beamforming online. To estimate the area and power requirements, the complete system was designed and the beamformer core was evaluated for a 130 nm CMOS technology. The estimated complexity per channel is 37.2 kGE and the corresponding power dissipation was estimated with 48 mW.

Publication status

published

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Book title

2014 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS) Proceedings

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Volume

Pages / Article No.

228 - 231

Publisher

Curran

Event

2014 IEEE Biomedical Circuits and Systems Conference (BioCAS 2014)

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Methods

Software

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03996 - Benini, Luca / Benini, Luca check_circle

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