FPGA Design and Implementation of

Ultrasound Power Measurement System

Rania binti Mahfooz

Yuan Wen HAU

Faculty of Biosciences and Medical Engineering

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Skudai, 81310 Johor, Malaysia
rania_1011@yahoo.com

Faculty of Biosciences and Medical Engineering

Universiti Teknologi Malaysia
Skudai, 81310 Johor, Malaysia
hauyuanwen@biomedical.utm.my

AbstractAs improvements in performance of Ultrasound

system by increasing its power and reliability, it has also shown
that those situations are associated with arguably safely concern.
Heating due to the energy absorption most widely impact on the
human tissue. Therefore, best sufficient overall power is desired
to avoid any unintended outcomes. Ultrasonic power
measurement is important in the calibration of transducer for
medical use or for other measurement application. Most of the
current ultrasound power meter are limited for either high
power therapeutic or low power diagnostic purposes but not both
and it is cost-expensive. This paper presents a design of in-house
ultrasound power measurement system that compact and simple
in construction, low-cost, easy and user-friendly but at the same
time provide a reliable power measurement result. This power
meter is designed and implemented on Altera Cyclone II DE2
FPGA board due to its reprogrammability and reconfigurability,
which is very effective for fast system prototyping. The actual
quantitative result have fmax 20.21MHz, power range 1mW/cm2
up to 10mW/cm2, temperature span 10C to 50C and frequency
range 1MHz to 10MHz.

Keywords Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), Temporalaverage Intensity (I-TA), ultrasound power meter.

PAPER ORGANIZATION:
Section I
Section II
Section III
Section IV
Section V

: Introduction of ultrasound power meter

: Related Work on Ultrasound Power
Measurement System
: Ultrasound Power meter System
Architecture
: Result and Discussions
: Conclusion
I.

INTRODUCTION

For the past decade, ultrasound machine has widely been

used to image the human body in medical technology. From
time to time, image in ultrasound has been improved by
increasing the ultrasound power. Although, increase in
transmitted ultrasound power improves the signal to noise ratio
of the image and biomedical use, it also creates thermal effect
and non-thermal effect. Thermal effect caused by absorption of
ultrasonic energy, whereas the changes direction of ultrasound
energy resulting in scattering phenomena gives the non-thermal
effect [1]. Therefore, best sufficient overall power is needed to
avoid any unfavorable outcomes.

The induced power by ultrasonic instrument must be within

safety boundary [2]. There were many specifications proposed
for measuring the physiotherapy ultrasound machine and came
a specification and standard for those purposes by the
International Elect-Technical Commission (IEC) in measuring
the physiotherapy ultrasound machine in beginning of 1960
[3]. Accurate power values are needed to ensure the equipment
are regulated under IEC61161-2 safety standard [4].
There are also equipment still be acquainted with poor
calibration status of physiotherapy tools and some product
mainly depend on radiation force balance. In addition, there
are also great acoustic impedance and power-loss ceramic
sensor but ceramic sensor does not match with low-impedance
human tissue. Therefore, ultrasound power meter is a device
used to measure and calibrate the output power and intensity
of the ultrasound machine for safety purpose.
To overcome the affirmation problems, this paper propose
an in-house ultrasound power measurement system design
which consists of signal acquisition unit, analog condition
circuit, digital processing unit and display unit based on
temporal-average intensity (I-TA) algorithm. The complete
measurement system was implemented on Altera Cyclone II
DE2 FPGA board to provide a user-frindly and cost-effective
solution.
II.

RELATED WORK ON ULTRASOUND POWER

MEASUREMENT SYSTEM

There is variety methods used to set up the ultrasound

power meter. The approach is the radiation force method,
calometric and hydrophone with polyvinylidene fluoride
(PVDF) sensor. It is mostly rely on a force balance approach
[5]. Furthermore, there are several ultrasound power meters
less in portability and high cost. Using radiation force balance
method [5] [6] and another with single polymer sensor [7].
Field programmable gate array (FPGA) platform was
developed in [8] for real-time ultrasound biomicroscophy. It
stated by demonstrating high quality result and spatial
resolution for imaging with emphasize for biomedical studies
were implemented a compact and cost-effective scheme. The
ultrasonic signal was proposed in [9] is an example of FPGA
based architecture for processing. Algorithm to calculate
ultrasound time-of-flight was implemented from many sensors

simultaneously with data mapping tasks in digital signal

processing built on FPGA.
III.

ULTRASOUND POWER METER SYSTEM

ARCHITECTURE

Ultrasound power meter is a device that measure the power

emitted by ultrasound. The complete system consists of signal
acquisition unit, analog condition circuit, digital processing
unit and LCD display unit as shown in figure 1.

liver equivalent gels from representing the highest possible

intensities which might be encountered in the body [10].
B. Analog condition circuit
The analog condition circuit is also another in-house
design, which consists of filter, amplifier and analog-digitalconverter. Analog data were received from actuating unit and
filtered it to removed noises and disturbance wave that affect
the final result. The amplification was used to amplify the
analog data so that the analog-digital-converter (ADC) that
convert analog to digital was received and easy ADC to
convert it. The data that come out from analog unit are digital
data.
C. Digital processing unit
This system receives the digital signal from analog
condition unit after ADC conversion. After buffering the data,
it performed the temporal-average intensity (ITA) calculation
and transformed the voltage to ultrasound intensity value as
shown in equation (1).

Figure 1 The system architecture of ultrasound power meter

The ultrasound instrument is the Commercial Ultrasound
Therapy Portable GB-818 (Green Ultrasonic Science &
Technology Equipment Manufacturing) as shown in figure 2.
It has 1MHz of frequency and 8 intensity levels with both
continuous and pulse mode. The ultrasound probe area is
5cm2.

Figure 2 The Commercial Ultrasound Therapy Portable

GB-818
A. Signal acquisition unit
This sub-system is an in-house sensor design using PVDF
[11], which is used to receive the signal from the ultrasound
transducer or transmitter (therapeutic probe) by using degassed water as ultrasound wave propagation medium. The degassed water was used because ultrasound propagation
behavior in water is similar with propagation in human tissues.
The ultrasonic attenuation in the water was taken as a lower
limit on the attenuation that will be encountered in the human
body. Most part in the human body consists of low attenuating
material such as urine. The use of water prevents
measurements in a more highly attenuating material such as

ITA =
Where,
N is the number of sampling;
V(i,T,x)2 is sensors output voltage
temperature and distance;
M(f) is sensitivity of sensor (1e-7 V/Pa):
is density of medium (1000kg/m3);
c is speed of sound in medium (1480m/s);

(1)

dependent

on

This complete digital processing unit is designed using

Verilog at Registe-Transfer-Level (RTL) Altera Quartus II
EDA software is used as the text editor and synthesis tool,
whereas the ModelSim is used as simulator to verify the subsystem functionality. The architecture of this project paper
which consist of control unit (CU) and datapath unit (DU) as
shown in figure 3. The DU consists of memory, arithmeticlogic-operation (ALU), accumulator and multiplexer as shown
in figure 4 which is control by master controller CU. The
complete digital processing unit is then downloaded into
Altera cyclone II DE2 board with proper pin assignment, so
that it can transmit the data between analog condition circuit
and LCD display unit using the PIC.

Figure 3 The top level of system module

Figure 4 The datapath unit of system module

D. Display unit
This sub-system is an in-house LCD display unit. PIC board
was used to display data on LCD from digital processing
unit.
IV.

RESULT AND DISCUSSION

Hardware prototyping of ultrasound power meter as

shown in figure 5 from system architecture in figure 1. The
I-TA from equation (1) was downloaded into Altera cyclone
II DE2 board using the Universal Serial Bus (USB)
ByteBlaster or so called Joint Test Action Group (JTAG)
cable. The result of ultrasound power meter were display on
LCD unit as shown in figure 6. The temperature on LCD
display was zero due to temperature sensor damaged.

Each sub-system has their own functionality. The

Commercial Ultrasound Therapy Portable GB-818 have
1MHz of frequency and 8 intensity levels with both
continuous and pulse mode which was used to put on PVDF
sensor tank. PVDF sensor provided 2.5MHz to 8.5MHz
responses with amplitude of around 4Vpp. Analog condition
circuit consists of filter, amplifier and converter which convert
analog signal to discrete digital signal. Digital processing unit
was received discrete digital signal from analog condition
circuit. To measure ultrasound power meter using ITA in unit of
mW/cm2.
The system specification of ITA after successfully runs the
simulation on Altera Quartus II as shown in table 1.

Frequency range
Temperature span
Power range
fmax
Logic element

1MHz 10MHz
10C to 50C
1mW/cm2 up to 10 mW/cm2
21.08MHz
15 434

Table 1 The system specification

V.

CONCLUSION

This in-house power measurement system has acceptable

running frequency 21.08MHz for the current biomedical
application and measurement accuracy. The limitation of the
system is using LCD with PIC controller and it has potential to
be further upgraded using LCD on Altera DE2 board for high
precision capability.
REFERENCE

Figure 5 Hardware prototyping of ultrasound power meter

Figure 5 The result ultrasound power meter display on LCD

using PIC controller

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