Problem
A manufacturer of ultrasonic diagnostic equipment plans to build an entry-level imaging system.  In order to keep the development cost to a minimum, a PC platform has been chosen, as it would allow software development using Windows operating system.

An analog output ultrasound probe has been selected.  This probe is used to send out a pulse at a regular interval and measure the response.  The PC then processes the data and provides the result on the built-in screen.  Initial testing has shown that analog to digital conversion by an 8-bit digital oscilloscope is sufficient to recover the entire dynamic range of the probe.

Manufacturer is now deciding whether to build the analog to digital converter in-house or to purchase an off the shelf waveform digitizer that can support all of the requirements for the project.

The Solution

The customer contacted AlazarTech with this requirement.  Application Engineers at AlazarTech worked closely with the customer to create an exhaustive list of requirements for the project.

The requirements include: sample rate of at least 40 MS/s sampling rate, at least 20 MHz bandwidth, 8 bit resolution, on-board acquisition memory, multiple-record capability, external trigger capability, programmable trigger delay feature, fast data throughput and, above all, low purchase price in quantities of 100 per year.

It was quite clear that the ideal product for the customer would be the ATS850 that offers 50 MS/s sampling, 25 MHz bandwidth and all other features required by the customer.  In fact, ATS850 was found to be the only product on the market in its class that offered the trigger delay feature - a must for the customer, as the signal of interest is always delayed from the initial pulse by a sizeable amount of time.

Customer purchased the first unit for in-house trials and was pleasantly surprised by the very high signal fidelity offered by the ATS850.  Customer calculated the SNR provided by the ATS850 to be in excess of 45 dB.  This compared very favorably even against a $10,000 digital oscilloscope, which came in at only 39 dB!  In short, there was no question that the signal quality offered by the ATS850 would do the job.

Customer was also able to select 50W input impedance to match with the output amplifier of the probe.

By selecting the external trigger input as the trigger source and programming the required delay, the customer captured exactly the signal of interest.  With other digitizers on the market, the customer would have needed additional acquisition memory to capture a long record and then just read a small part of it.  It would have worked, too, but the cost of a deep memory digitizer would have been higher.

Finally, the low price point of the ATS850 convinced the customer that they should adopt the ATS850 as their waveform digitizer, and abandon any thought of an in-house development project to build the digitizer.

A software project was launched to use the Software Development Kit (SDK) to incorporate the functionality of the ATS850 within the customer's own C++ application.  The easy to use API of the ATS850 made short work of this part of the project.

Conclusion
The customer was able to launch their product within 4 months of developing the concept, thanks to commercial, off-the-shelf components such as Pentium motherboards, ultrasound probes and the ATS850 waveform digitizer.  Not only was the development time cut short, the customer was also able to achieve their initial gross margin target by using low cost components without compromising quality.