Embedded real-time S/W beamforming platform with reconfigurable multi-core processors

Minsoo Kim; Changyong Son; Kangeun Lee; Do-Hyung Kim; Shihwa Lee

doi:10.1117/12.2007246

29 March 2013 Embedded real-time S/W beamforming platform with reconfigurable multi-core processors

Minsoo Kim, Changyong Son, Kangeun Lee, Do-Hyung Kim, Shihwa Lee

Proceedings Volume 8675, Medical Imaging 2013: Ultrasonic Imaging, Tomography, and Therapy; 86751A (2013) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2007246
Event: SPIE Medical Imaging, 2013, Lake Buena Vista (Orlando Area), Florida, United States

Abstract

In modern medical ultrasound signal processing, beamforming is usually implemented on H/W solution by ASIC(Application Specific Integrated Circuit) because of its huge computation. ASIC solution has a problem with flexibility to support various beamforming algorithms. Nowadays, computing ability of GPU(Graphic processing unit) becomes very high, therefore many approaches have been proposed for S/W beamforming on GPU. Although the high performance of GPU, commercial GPU is not proper for portable ultrasound, because of its large power consumption. The motivation of this paper is evaluating the feasibility of embedded multi-core system as S/W beamforming solution for portable ultrasound. To develop embedded S/W beamforming platform, we propose the platform with multiple embedded processors called RP(Reconfigurable Processor) and special co-processors. Whole system is composed of 6 computing clusters and single cluster is composed of 8 RP processors and 1 co-processor. The number of clusters in the system can be changed depending on computational requirement. To evaluate the performance of the proposed platform, we implemented MV(Minimum Variance) beamforming, which is one of the most complex beamforming, on that platform. 4 approaches were mainly used to accelerate MV beamforming. The first one is co-processor for accelerating MAC(Multiply and Accumulate) operations, the second one is special instructions for beamforming, the third one is SIMD(Single Instruction Multiple Data), and the last one is CGA(Corse Grained Architecture) acceleration which is special function of RP. As a final result, 128channel 30fps(frame per second) real-time MV beamformer was achieved on the proposed platform.

Citation Download Citation

Minsoo Kim, Changyong Son, Kangeun Lee, Do-Hyung Kim, and Shihwa Lee "Embedded real-time S/W beamforming platform with reconfigurable multi-core processors", Proc. SPIE 8675, Medical Imaging 2013: Ultrasonic Imaging, Tomography, and Therapy, 86751A (29 March 2013); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2007246

ACCESS THE FULL ARTICLE

INSTITUTIONAL
Select your institution to access the SPIE Digital Library.

SELECT YOUR INSTITUTION

PERSONAL
Sign in with your SPIE account to access your personal subscriptions or to use specific features such as save to my library, sign up for alerts, save searches, etc.

PERSONAL SIGN IN

No SPIE Account? Create one

PURCHASE THIS CONTENT

SUBSCRIBE TO DIGITAL LIBRARY

50 downloads per 1-year subscription

Members: $195

Non-members: $335 ADD TO CART

25 downloads per 1 - year subscription

Members: $145

Non-members: $250 ADD TO CART

PURCHASE SINGLE ARTICLE

Includes PDF, HTML & Video, when available