New demodulation filter in digital phase rotation beamforming

In this paper, we present a new quadrature demodulation filter to reduce hardware complexity in digital phase rotation beamforming. Due to its low sensitivity to phase delay errors, digital quadrature demodulation is commonly used in ultrasound machines. However, since it requires two lowpass filters for each channel to remove harmonics, the direct use of conventional finite impulse response (FIR) filters in ultrasound machines is computationally expensive and burdensome. In our new method, an efficient multi-stage uniform coefficient (MSUC) filter is utilized to remove harmonic components in phase rotation beamforming. In comparison with the directly implemented FIR (DI-FIR) and the previously-proposed signed-power-of-two FIR (SPOT-FIR) lowpass filters, the proposed MSUC filter reduces the necessary hardware resources by 93.9% and 83.9%, respectively. In simulation, the MSUC filter shows a negligible degradation in image quality. The proposed method resulted in comparable spatial and contrast resolution to the DI-FIR approach in the phantom study. These preliminary results indicate that the proposed quadrature demodulation filtering method could significantly reduce the hardware complexity in phase rotation beamforming while maintaining comparable image quality.