After a brief introduction on the research staff of the Microelectronics Systems Design Lab in Florence, this talk will present the general architecture of the ULA-OP and ULA-OP 256 scanners, so far developed in the same lab. The focus will then be shifted to some real-time applications of the same scanners.
Two different (single-gate and multi-gate) vector Doppler approaches will be presented and their velocity measurement results will be compared to the results of standard measurements based on the detection of Doppler peak frequencies.
Some preliminary test of imaging and Doppler pulse compression methods for S/N enhancement will also be reported.
Finally, the current activities on parallel beamforming for real-time high-frame rate (HFR) imaging will be presented, together with the first applications to multi-line transmit cardiac imaging, plane-wave-based vascular color flow mapping and multiline vector Doppler imaging.
The talk will be concluded with a short description of the work-in-progress for the development of a 2D matrix array whose elementsare positioned according to the seeds in a sunflower, to guarantee uniform sound beam performance in a full volume.