A pipelined architecture for high speed automated NDE

Automated ultrasonic inspection of large structures usually demands both high scanning speed and accuracy. Digital signal processing techniques help to achieve the latter, but a very high computing speed is required. This paper presents a pipelined architecture directed towards NDE applications which supports high data processing rates. At the same time, it is flexible for hard real-time NDE applications. It is built as a pipeline of specialized Processing Modules (PMs) which operate concurrently. Several PMs have been developed, each one implementing a specific digital processing task for NDE applications: digitalization, trace averaging, attenuation-distance compensation, multi-gate generation, multi-peak detection, deconvolution and split-spectrum processing. Most of these algorithms can be executed at pulse repetition frequencies above 8 kHz.