Pharmaceutical & medical
UNLOCKING THE POTENTIAL OF OPEN-SOURCE EVALUATION PLATFORMS FOR PROTOTYPING ULTRASOUND TRANSMIT SUBSYSTEMS
I
n any new technology development process, before commercialising new models or next-generation ultrasound machines, manufacturers undergo stages of hardware development and testing, and system integration and validation. Developing a high channel count imaging ultrasound subsystem is expected to take many years of effort. Furthermore, jumping into hardware prototyping of the beam steering or transmit subsystem with limited knowledge of system considerations can be costly as it can result in multiple revisions of the hardware prototype. Now, a complete system (prototype board and open-source software) can be used to emulate the operation of an ultrasound machine subsystem, thereby reducing development cost and time-to-market for ultrasound manufacturers.
By Sunshine Grace Cabatan, staff engineer, and Melissa Lorenz Lacanlale, product engineer, both with Analog Devices
This article discusses the challenges in developing state-of-the-art ultrasound machines. An existing evaluation platform can be used to reduce both system development costs and the characterisation time of the transmit block of an ultrasound system. Step-by-step procedures are presented in this article on how multiple channels may be synchronised, a crucial concept in beam steering and one that is unique to medical imaging.
Figure 1. The AD9106 Mbed- enabled evaluation platform.
ARDUINO-BASED TXDAC EVALUATION BOARD WITH OPEN-SOURCE MBED SOFTWARE The AD9106-ARDZ-EBZ evaluation platform is compatible with Arm-based Mbed-enabled boards like SDP-K1 and is designed to connect to Arduino Uno headers. The evaluation setup can be powered by USB only and does not require a high frequency waveform generator for clock input. The evaluation board by default uses an on-board 156.25 MHz crystal oscillator as a clock source but provides an external clocking option. DAC outputs can be transformer-coupled or evaluated with on-board amplifiers, the only time a 7 VDC to 12 VDC 30 W AC-to-DC adapter is needed. See Figure 1.
Along with the hardware, example open- source codes are provided on the evaluation board web page and can be used as starting point for developing firmware for targeted applications. The evaluation boards and the example source codes can be customised to work with other Mbed platforms. The new evaluation system eases prototyping because it can be easily integrated into existing systems. The evaluation board is populated with the AD9106 quad, low power, 12-bit, 180 MSPS, TxDAC, and waveform generator. The DAC’s high sampling rate is ideal for ultrasound operating frequencies
74 June 2024 Instrumentation Monthly
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