A Preliminary work on Pre-Beamformed Data Acquisition System for Ultrasound Imaging with 2-D Tranducer

This paper present a preliminary work on a pre-beamformed data acquisition ultrasound imaging system for a 3-MHz, 32x32 2-D array tranducer. The row-column addressing scheme is adopted for the transducer fabrication. This scheme provides a simple interconnection, consisting of one top and one bottom single-layer flex circuits. The designed system can acquire pre-beamformed data with 12-bit resolution at 40-MHz sampling rate. The digitized data of all channels are first fed through FPGAs to deserialize and stored in a 4GB RAM buffer. The acquired data can be transferred through a 1000 Mbps Ethernet link to a computer for off-line processing and analysis. The system design is based on high-level commercial integrated circuits to obtain the maximum flexibility and minimum system complexity. Partial beam summation have been performed to help finish the 3-D B-mode volumetric imaging.