Software beamforming: comparison between a phased array and synthetic transmit aperture

The data-transfer and computation requirements are compared between software-based beamforming using a phased array (PA) and a synthetic transmit aperture (STA). The advantages of a software-based architecture are reduced system complexity and lower hardware cost. Although this architecture can be implemented using commercial CPUs or GPUs, the high computation and data-transfer requirements limit its real-time beamforming performance. In particular, transferring the raw rf data from the front-end subsystem to the software back-end remains challenging with current state-of-the-art electronics technologies, which offset the cost advantage of the software back end. This study investigated the tradeoff between the data-transfer and computation requirements. Two beamforming methods based on a PA and STA, respectively, were used: the former requires a higher data transfer rate and the latter requires more memory operations. The beamformers were implemente;d in an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260 GPU and an Intel core i7 920 CPU. The frame rate of PA beamforming was 42 fps with a 128-element array transducer, with 2048 samples per firing and 189 beams per image (with a 95 MB/frame data-transfer requirement). The frame rate of STA beamforming was 40 fps with 16 firings per image (with an 8 MB/frame data-transfer requirement). Both approaches achieved real-time beamforming performance but each had its own bottleneck. On the one hand, the required data-transfer speed was considerably reduced in STA beamforming, whereas this required more memory operations, which limited the overall computation time. The advantages of the GPU approach over the CPU approach were clearly demonstrated.