Efficient Parallel-Beamforming Based on Shared FIFO for Ultra-Compact Ultrasound Imaging Systems

The realization of a parallel-beamforming (pBF) method in ultra-compact ultrasound imaging systems is challenging to achieve uncompromised beamforming accuracy in limited hardware and power resources. In this paper, we present a new hardware- and power-efficient pBF method that utilizes a shared first-in-first-out block on a post-fractional delay filtering architecture (pBF-sFIFO). For an analog-to-digital conversion (ADC) rate given, the proposed pBF-sFIFO method yielded beamforming accuracy comparable to that by an unconstrained pBF (pBF-CON) method, with up to 15% less power consumption. Otherwise, a conventional time-sharing pBF method (pBF-TS) was more vulnerable to aliasing artifacts. Even though increasing ADC rate in the pBF-TS method could recover the beamforming accuracy, exponential need in power consumption was inevitable. Therefore, the pBF-sFIFO method would be an effective solution to enable advanced imaging features in ultra-compact ultrasound imaging systems.