Design of a LVDS RX soft IP kernel for multichannel ultrasound imaging systems

In this paper, a soft IP kernel of LVDS (low-voltage differential signaling) receivers is proposed for multichannel ultrasound imaging applications. By means of careful cell-based design, a high-speed de-serializer is developed with control-able bit-shift and delay-adjustment operations. Furthermore, using the proposed hybrid coarse-tune and two-level fine-tune schemes, a synchronization controller can perform efficient and robust multichannel LVDS signal synchronizing processes in cooperation with the de-serializer. The proposed LVDS IP kernel is synthesizable cell-based design, which is soft/portable to different circuit technology and system applications. Based on the proposed LVDS structure, four sets of 8-channel LVDS receivers were designed and implemented on a 32-channel FPGA-based ultrasound imaging platform. Integrated with the ultrasound AFE/HVFE (analog and high-voltage front-end) module, a throughput of 480 Mb/s per channel can be achieved for test patterns, 32-channel ultrasound image and color-Doppler display.