P2B-2 A New Architectural Design of Full Aperture, Full Frame-Rate Synthetic Aperture Beamforming ASIC

In ultrasound imaging, synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) supported by full aperture and full frame rate is desirable for an improved resolution, SNR and real time imaging, however, real time implementation requires RF data from all channels have to be transferred to all scan-lines in real time so that implemented hardware become very complex and this complexity hindered to the practical implementation. In this paper, a new intuitive and simple architecture which minimizes this complexity, especially the interconnections between Rx channel (from ADC) and ASIC, is presented. This architecture contains high speed serial data transfer (employing low voltage differential signaling - LVDS), division of the channels into groups and RF data sharing bus. Also modular structure is employed so that ASIC can be repeatedly placed for easy system implementation. Chip area (CA) and power consumption (PC) have been estimated for the system with proposed architecture and it is been confirmed that ASIC can be constructed using a 0.13 um semiconductor process.