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Digital Beamforming for Ultrasound Imaging

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Short Description

Ultrasound imaging is an important biomedical technique for analyzing soft tissues in the human body, with both diagnostic and therapeutic applications. IIS is involved in a project developing a high-performance, portable 3D ultrasound platform.

The basic principle of ultrasound imaging is to excite the target body with high-frequency acoustic pulses and to form an image using the back-reflected echoes. The reconstruction of the image based on these echoes is called beamforming and for today's 2D transducer heads with several thousand transducer elements, it is definitely the computationally most intensive operation.

The goal of this semester project is an ASIC which performs digital processing of the reflected signals received by the piezzo-electric transducers. The basic idea is to delay and add the received pulses in order to collect all energy stemming from one single point. This is called receive beamforming. Per excitation pulse, this can be done for many points, which leads to enormous amounts of data. An intelligent algorithm in the ASIC shall pre-process this data in order to compact it for the transport to the imaging system. A special challenge pose the high-speed output pin drivers. In case of interest in analog design, investigations and a dedicated layout implementation are welcome.

This project is sponsored by UltrasoundToGo Nano-Tera Project

Status: Available

Looking for Interested Students
Supervision: Pirmin Vogel, Pascal Hager

Character

30% Theory, Algorithms and Simulation
40% VHDL
30% ASIC Design

Prerequisites

VLSI I
Matlab, VHDL

Professor

Luca Benini