Computationally efficient architecture for ultrasound phase rotation beamforming

A commonly used phase rotation beamforming (PRBF) technique in medical ultrasound scanners requires four multipliers to realise phase rotation (PR) in addition to two lowpass filters for quadrature demodulation for each channel. A new scheme is presented to reduce the computational complexity of PRBF without sacrificing image quality that uses only 16 PRs located behind inter-channel adders, regardless of the number of channels, each of which is dedicated for one of 16 quantised PR values using a step size of 2π/16.