Development of a digital 35MHz, 64-channel phased ultrasound array imaging system for NDT applications

A system is composed of 64 channels of analog front-end pulser/receiver, 64 channels of Time-Gain Compensation (TGC), 64 channels of high-speed digitizer, and DSP-based beamformer implementation. The data are transferred to a PC via an Ethernet card. The system provides 64 channels of excitation pulsers while receiving simultaneously at a 120-200 MHz sampling rate at 12-bit resolution. The digitized data of all channels are first fed through FPGAs, and then stored in memories. Those raw data are then accessed by a DSP where the beamformer is implemented. The open architecture of the system design has the capability of carrying out synthetic aperture algorithms with the combination of single/multiple elements in transmit and single/multiple elements in reception.