Designers of medical modalities like ultrasound have historically implemented custom designed hardware. Now commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) modular systems are increasingly available based on single board computers (SBC) and embedded CPU boards, comprising either:
- x86 CPU-based technology with Windows OS
or - An open standard operating system like Linux, coupled with RISC CPU(s)
These SBCs previously used PCI parallel standards as their I/O expansion interface for data movement, with much of the equipment functionality implemented in software. In the future, these SBCs will implement:
- Higher bandwidth PCI Express (PCIe) I/O, while maintaining PCI software compatibility
- Gigabit Ethernet for connectivity to other equipment and the Internet
For your application-specific needs, you can now:
- Easily implement PCIe modular boards using Altera’s PCIe MegaCore functions
- Integrate multiple serializer/deserializer (SERDES) channels up to 6.5 Gbps within Stratix® II GX FPGAs
- Rapidly create custom functionality and interfaces using Stratix II FPGAs and the Quartus® II software
Figure 1 shows how these modular PCIe function boards can be made application independent, providing higher volumes across multiple medical modalities by separating the application-specific analog interfaces to detectors/sensors onto daughter cards.
Figure 1. Modular-Based Systems
