Author(s)

Pramod Govindan, Vidya Vasudevan, Thomas Gonnot, Jafar Saniie

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA.

Ultrasonic testing systems have been extensively used in medical imaging and non-destructive testing applications. Generally, these systems aim at a particular application or target material. To make these systems portable and more adaptable to the test environments, this study presents a reconfigurable ultrasonic testing system (RUTS), which possesses dynamic reconfiguration capabilities. RUTS consists a fully programmable Analog Front-End (AFE), which facilitates beamforming and signal conditioning for variety of applications. RUTS AFE supports up to 8 transducers for phased-array implementation. Xilinx Zynq System-on-Chip (SoC) based Zedboard provides the back-end processing of RUTS. The powerful ARM embedded processor available within Zynq SoC manages the ultrasonic data acquisition/processing and overall system control, which makes RUTS a unique platform for the ultrasonic researchers to experiment and evaluate a wide range of real-time ultrasonic signal processing applications. This Linux-based system is utilized for ultra-sonic data compression implementation providing a versatile environment for further development of ultrasonic imaging and testing system. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the capabilities of RUTS by performing ultrasonic data acquisition and data compression in real-time. Thus, this reconfigurable system enables ultrasonic designers and researchers to efficiently prototype different experiments and to incorporate and analyze high performance ultrasonic signal and image processing algorithms.

Dynamic Reconfiguration, System-on-Chip, Analog Front-End, Ultrasonic Imaging

Govindan, P. , Vasudevan, V. , Gonnot, T. and Saniie, J. (2015) Reconfigurable Ultrasonic Testing System Development Using Programmable Analog Front-End and Reconfigurable System-on-Chip Hardware. Circuits and Systems, 6, 161-171. doi: 10.4236/cs.2015.67017.