Hardware-efficient methods for elimination of signal distortion in sigma-delta-based ultrasound beamforming

An efficient ultrasound beamforming algorithm based on sigma-delta modulation (SDM) is proposed, which performs dynamic focusing at the Nyquist rate as in conventional delay-sum beamformers. Specifically, a block of consecutive SDM samples for each focal point is selected on each channel according to the focusing delay. The data blocks for all channels are then added up on a bit-to-bit basis and the resulting block of multibit samples is fed to the demodulation filter to produce the focused signal. Since the SDM samples in each data block are not altered at all, the proposed method does not cause any signal distortion. Two hardware structures are also proposed for minimum hardware implementation of the proposed error-free SDM beamforming method. It is verified that compared to the delay-sum beamformer using 10-bit ADCs, the proposed algorithm provides almost the same image quality with a greatly reduced hardware complexity. In addition, it can be implemented with a lower hardware complexity than that of the conventional SDM beamformer when the number of channels is 64 or less.