Reconfigurable Ultrasonic Testing System Development Using Programmable Analog Front-End and Reconfigurable System-on-Chip Hardware

Abstract

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.