Ultrasonic
Signal Processing Platform for Nondestructive Evaluation (NDE)
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Ultrasonic
nondestructive evaluation (NDE) has been widely used in quality
assessment and failure analysis for critical structures or components
in manufacturing, bridge structure, microelectronic packaging, and
composite materials for aircraft structure. The NDE system is commonly
designed on microcontrollers and digital signal processors, which fall
short of meeting the demands of high speed and requirements of
adaptability. This requires reconfigurable computing devices to
implement the system.
A Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) is a semiconductor device which
contains configurable logic blocks, programmable interconnects and
flexible input/output blocks. It is widely used in applications within:
automotive, communications, industrial automation, motor control, video
processing, and medical imaging fields. Without requiring hardware
changes, the use of an FPGA expands the product life by updating data
stream files. Additionally FPGAs have grown to have the
capability to hold an entire system on a single chip.
The goal of this project is to build a prototype ultrasonic signal
processing platform using FPGAs. The platform acquires ultrasound data
at the speed of 100 million samples per second. The embedded system
running on an FPGA is reprogrammable to test new signal processing
algorithms and new NDE standards/methods. To demonstrate the system, a
split spectrum processing algorithm is implemented and the result is
displayed on a touch screen LCD. Thanks to the flexibility of
FPGA, the platform is not limited to ultrasound NDE application.
It may have a broader impact on future project development
for signal processing research and education.