Time-sharing bilinear delay interpolation for ultrasound dynamic receive beamformer

In ultrasound dynamic receive beamforming, focusing delays need to be updated for individual focal points, leading to increased hardware complexity. Proposed is a new efficient delay calculation method based on time-sharing bilinear delay interpolation (TS-BDI) to reduce both hardware complexity and focusing delay errors for portable ultrasound systems. The TS-BDI provides 2.5 dB improvement in the signal-to-noise ratio compared to the TS-LDI (linear delay interpolation). In addition, the proposed TS-BDI lowers the hardware complexity in the 64-channel digital dynamic receive beamformer compared to the conventional method, i.e. 36.0 reduction in equivalent gate counts. These results indicate that the proposed TS-BDI method could provide better accuracy in focusing delay calculation with reduced hardware complexity for portable ultrasound systems.