Dynamic Ultrasound Beamforming Using Left-to-Right Arithmetic Adders on FPGA

Adder trees are the computational backbone of delay-and-sum (DAS) ultrasound beamforming, where their implementation directly determines the energy, throughput, and area of a real-time imaging pipeline.

Conventional parallel adder trees perform full-precision combinational reduction on every sample, leading to wide critical paths, high LUT consumption, and timing failures on small FPGA devices.

This paper presents an alternative adder tree architecture based on \emph{left-to-right (LR)} or \emph{most significant digit first (MSDF) arithmetic}.

We implement the proposed and conventional adder trees on a Xilinx Zynq XC7Z010 FPGA and evaluate them for DAS beamforming of a 64-channel ultrasound dataset.

The proposed design uses 2.5$\times$ fewer LUTs than the smallest conventional tree, successfully meets the timing constraint, and consumes 23\% less dynamic power than the most efficient conventional baseline.

A key advantage of the proposed MSDF adder tree is that it can generate high-quality beamformed images without waiting for full-precision completion.

This naturally enables dynamic precision at runtime with negligible control overhead, since precision selection is achieved simply by stopping the computation clock after the desired number of cycles.

Such quality--energy scalability is fundamentally unavailable in conventional fixed-cycle adder trees.

Iso-area replication enables up to 15 parallel instances on the XC7Z010, achieving 67 FPS, which is 80\% higher throughput than the best conventional design.