Design and Development of Parallel Beamformer Model for RTL Verification

Medical ultrasound scanners are among the most advanced signal processing devices in use. The beamformer is the brain of the scanner's whole signal processing system. Beamforming enables targeted or spatially selective message delivery and reception. In receiver, beamforming is employed to focus the reflected signals from diverse tissue structures in the area of concern. The delay sum beam former is a common approach in which signals from various depths of field are suitably delayed and added to create an ultrasonic beam. High frame rate (HFR) ultrasonic (US) imaging systems commonly use plane-wave transmission followed by parallel reception beamforming. The parallel beamforming improves temporal resolution significantly, and usually realized as a dedicated hardware module. The hardware realization is usually in register transfer level (RTL) implementation using any hardware description language (HDL). The proposed work aims to design and develop an effective parallel beamformer golden reference model for module level verification. The hardware module of a parallel beamformer is very complex to verify. Hence, a python-based software model of as a golden reference is developed for verification. Considering the versatility, ease of use and ability to interface with wide range of HDLs, python model of parallel beamformer is designed. Equivalence checking is performed with MATLAB® model to conclude the correctness of the developed model.