Digital ultrasound beam former with flexible channel and frequency range reconfiguration

摘要

A digital ultrasound beam former for ultrasound imaging, that can be configured by a control processor to process the signals from ultrasound transducer arrays with variable number of elements at variable sampling frequencies, where the lowest sampling frequency allows for the highest number of array elements. The maximal number of array elements is reduced in the inverse proportion to the sampling frequency. The beam former can be operated both in a RF-sampling mode and a quadrature mode. Parallel coupling of transmit/receive circuits for each element allow adaption of the receive Noise Figure and transmit drive capabilities to variations in the electrical impedance of the array elements.