P2B-7 Development of a Versatile Signal Processing Board for Real-Time 3D Beamforming

In this paper, we describe the design and performance of a high-speed, signal processing board designed for real-time 3D ultrasound beamforming. The system can generate 100M beamformed voxels per second from the data received from a 288 element array. Our primary scan volume produces an 80x80x246 volume image updated at a rate of 24 volumes per second, with 4 depth transmit focal zones. Preliminary beamforming tests have shown good agreement with modeled simulations. The average amplitude of the pedestal secondary lobe in the radiation pattern was about -72 dB for a point target at f/2. Average single channel noise levels were measured at 400 nV/rtHz at high gain (+43 dB). This corresponds to a single channel signal to noise ratio of 54 dB for a 13.2 MHz bandwidth and results in a system dynamic range of 96 dB. The channel-to-channel isolation was approximately 46 dB.