Various Ultrasound Beamformer Designs and Architectures: An Update

A medical ultrasound scanner is a complex digital signal processing system, and it has sophisticated transmitter and receiver signal processing chain. The receive signal processing chain involves many complex signal processing functions, and among them the most complex and significant is the digital beamformer. The beamformer can be considered as the brain of whole signal processing system of the scanner. Beamforming allows message transmission or reception to be directed or spatially selective. It is used in receive signal processing to concentrate the signals of interest in the region of concern as reflections from various tissue structures. As beamformer is the complex signal processing engine in a scanner, practical implementation of the same has significant challenges. This chapter provides an insight of the various receive beamformer architectures implemented in field programmable gate array (FPGA)/application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) for ultrasound imaging.