[lnsru]

One still needs expensive FPGA or DSP for beamforming in decent ultrasound machine. Nothing for 100$. Maybe some single channel sensor, but I also doubt that after FDA approval price will stay in 100$ range. Plus I am worried about long time stability of polymers. Moisture or UV or mechanical load can alter polymer’s structure.

[snops]

Moore's law will take care of the processing cost nicely, especially as more commodity processors become powerful enough to handle it.

The ADCs and other analog stuff might be more of a hurdle, the design of them is quite hard, they aren't able to take advantages of smaller transistors as well, and competition in the space is decreasing as semiconductor companies keep merging (e.g. Analog Devices and Linear Technologies).

[namibj]

At these low frequencies very simple oversampling Delta-Sigma ADCs work well, considering the sample rate is in the low 3-digit MHz range at most, which can easily be processed by even an 15$ FPGA that has SerDes suitable for USB3 or PCIe2 [0]. Considering you can just shift the noise out of the frequency of your ultrasound with the correct averaging filter in the FPGA to convert the 1-bit high sample rate to many-bit passband (one might want to fold the quadrature demodulator for RX phase sensitivity into this filter to save on comnpute). It would basically be a many-channel, fixed frequency (by software configuration only) RX SDR.

[0]: https://www.mouser.de/ProductDetail/Lattice/LFE5UM5G-25F-8MG...

[madengr]

The clock jitter may get you. You can oversample and decimate to obtain the equivalent ENOB, but then the sample clock stability becomes more difficult and costly.

[bleke]

Beamforming is cheap, for sectorial scan phone cpu can easily handle it, of course it will not be all big HQ image, but for initial scan is enough, but ADC with pulse generator - that one is expensive, for decent quality digital steering you need for example minimum 16 channel adc in mhz range and that one is not cheap. If you think it cheap go and google 128 channel ADC plus 128 pulse generators with protection circuit (i know somebody says overkill, but for ndt is pretty norm)

ndt - non destructive testing

[lnsru]

Googled it. DDC1128ZKLT ADC costs 212€ a piece, but can sample at 6.25 kS/s what is way too low for this application. 8 fast 16 channel ADCs cost a fortune. They also require at least one FPGA with high pin count and these aren’t cheap either. My conclusion: decent ultrasound scanner can’t be cheap from bill of materials perspective alone.