FPGA-based Ultrasonic NDT System
The FPGA used in the project is Cyclone V SoC on the development board DE10-Standard. A customized PCB which takes care of the pulse generating and signal amplification was designed and manufactured. The probes used in experiments were common commercial ultrasonic probes. The probes used in our lab were 5MHz and 20MHz.
In the first working prototype, an external power source is necessary to supply “high” voltages to the pulse generator.
In a later revision, the board incorporates the high voltage generation, and it became adjustable from 0 to 100V. This revision helped shrink the size of the whole unit.
A user interface was developed with C++ program on the ARM core inside the FPGA. The external monitor was driven by VGA port.
The unit can be used to perform ultrasonic pulse-echo sensing.
The development and improvement are still going on. The next aim of the project is to evolve into multichannel platform for multi-element probes which can perform phased array sensing.
