Variations on a mobile ultrasound platform
31 March 2011
With the introduction of the Kontron Microspace MSMST, the first PCIe/104 Embedded SBC featuring an Intel Atom E600 series processor with an Altera FPGA on a single multi-chip module has now become available.
This will be of interest to suppliers of ultrasound equipment as they can now use a platform - that is available as a highly integrated standard product and can be adapted for individual specifications - as a complete customer-specific design.
Ultrasound, or sonography, is used in medical technology for treating kidney or gall stones, for removing dental tartar and as an imaging method for diagnosis and display; as ultrasound is capable of examining all organs that contain water and are rich in blood.
Conventionally, ultrasonic transducers are used for exogenous purposes, however endoscopy equipment with ultrasound (endosonography) is also available, and used for ovary, prostrate, heart and stomach screening. In addition to this, ultrasonic equipment is used in medical laboratories in microscopes.
The percentage of ‘non-traditional’ ultrasonic applications is on the increase; a further example of this being the ultrasonicsupported local anaesthetic. Ultrasonic equipment is also becoming more and more mobile to ensure flexible usage in the practice at the point-of-care, or to allow for emergency examinations by the rescue services. The quality of these examination methods is improving all the time, too. Five years ago, 3D ultrasound was considered innovative. Now, it is an everyday thing in many practices. Technology and performance are improving too, and this is where innovative electronics are required.
Signal processing with FPGA
An important pre-condition for these innovations is the increase in computing power. A total of up to 10,000 million operations per second (MOPS) has to be carried out in order to process the blood flow speed from signals of 64 transducer elements at 12 bit and a sampling rate of 25 ns in combination with the Doppler effect.
FPGAs provide a good technological basis for the first processing of raw data delivered from the ultrasonic probes. Firstly, because of the highly dedicated computing power they offer depending on the required design; and secondly due to the guaranteed long-term availability of the whole solution in comparison to solutions with logic set in hardware. Also, in comparison to dedicated components like DSPs, FPGAs have a flexibly programmable logic, which gives developers the freedom to program interfaces and functions according to their requirements.
With FPGAs, depending upon which probe is connected, adjusting the raw data processing is another possibility. Thanks to this flexible I/O design, medical technology OEMs can efficiently develop designs that, in terms of I/O requirements, can be tailored to meet the exact requirements of their target applications. Even when ‘end of life’ announcements for components are made, this no longer proves to be an issue thanks to programmable logic, as the soft IP (Intellectual Property) remains and can be ported to a new FPGA component with little effort.
These advantages are the reason behind the sharp increase in FPGAs in ultrasonic equipment. Fast FPGAs on their own do not fulfil the long list of requirements of modern medical technology.
Another aspect is the whole x86 infrastructure required for visualisation, user-interaction and – depending on the system – further computer-aided diagnosis. This is where the real dilemma of the equipment manufacturers lies. To date, no standard platform offering FPGA and x86 as a standard product or evaluation platform has been available. Therefore, a customerspecific design was always necessary. The availability of new FPGA solutions has changed all this. For example, a standard based PCIe/104 SBC with an integrated Intel Atom E600 series processor with an Altera FPGA on a compact module is now available.
The Kontron MSMST PCIe/104 SBC can be seen as a new milestone of this integration, as, momentarily, it is the only available solution in which the highly integrated multi-chip module is already implemented. This symbiosis of both technologies on one compact SBC means that application developers profit from a simplified application design and reduced development effort. As a long-term available standard component, this type of platform fulfils all requirements regarding reduced development effort, minimised design risk and Total-Cost-of-Ownership (TCO).
Parallel to this, the COM Express FPGA Starterkit with Altera Cyclone IV GX FPGA is available, which allows developers to make an immediate start on developing dedicated FPGA-based applications. The Starterkit comprises all the components required for evaluating new board designs with userdefinable I/Os. The components of the Starterkit and the Computer-on-Module that has been selected, plus individual High Speed Mezzanine Cards (HSMC) with additional physical interfaces, can be put together in a matter of minutes. Software developers can immediately start the programming of the platform, and, if required, the customer can commission Kontron with the complete development, including revision control and country-specific or market-specific test and examination procedures.
For the customer-specific I/O design, both Kontron solutions offer HSMC slots, which physically execute the desired interfaces of the FPGAs. If compatible HSMCs are obtained directly from Altera, invariably the corresponding IP cores are delivered with them. The application evaluation can therefore begin directly after a few installation steps. Following successful evaluation, if so wished by the customer, Kontron takes on the serial development and production of the customer-specific platform.
IP cores that have already been validated and are available are application-specific I/Os like CAN bus, serial interfaces (SPI Master / UART) and PCI-Express, I2C and GPIO. Further IP cores are in the process of being developed or validated. This results in the platform being much faster and increasingly more flexible to configure. All OEMs need is the necessary IP core and the corresponding HSMC to execute the interfaces. For even more I/Os, Kontron offers FPGA programming as a software service.
Medical equipment OEMs with their own hardware development are now facing the question of whether – due to the availability of pre-integrated COTS components and solutions – the effort of developing and manufacturing the hardware platforms themselves is justifiable. An alternative would be outsourcing the design to strong partners and the OEM could concentrate on the application development with the specific IP for the FPGAs and the software development for the customers’ applications.
This could result in a higher innovation potential, shorter development cycles and improved quality.
It can be assumed that the ecosystem surrounding the FPGA will notably tend towards application-ready solutions due to more x86 and FPGAs being coupled together. So it is something OEMs have to consider carefully and weigh up whether an integrated solution like this could be the right choice for them.
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