Real-time implementation of the echo signal processing and digital scan conversion for medical ultrasound imaging with a single TMS320C6416 DSP

Software implementation of a medical ultrasound imaging system using commercial DSPs (Digital Signal Processor) has advantages over FPGA- or ASIC-based system in development cost and time. The authors have developed a full software-based ultrasound scanner consisting of a typical analog front-end block and a DSP system. In this work, we present efficient methods for software realization of an echo processor to perform all the ultrasound signal processing functions following the receive beamforming. For implementation with a single TMS320C6416 DSP, the most computationally demanding functions such as dynamic filtering, quadrature demodulation, decimation, magnitude calculation, and log compression are implemented using modified algorithms and structures optimized to best match the DSP architecture for fast computation. The DSC (digital scan converter) is realized with an LUT for generating memory addresses and interpolation coefficients for each display point. The LUT table is stored in a single external SDRAM so that the internal DSP memory can be fully utilized by the DSP core to maximize the processing speed. The possible memory stall that can be caused by the external memory access is removed by properly employing the enhanced direct memory access channels. Experimental results show that the proposed implementation can support up to 4 kHz PRF (pulse repetition frequency) when the input data rate is 40 MHz.