This board is the heart of an prominent ultrasound scanner on the market today. An ETX  small board computer plugs onto the control board using four of the connectors near the middle. The ETX talks to the board using the PCI interface through the big chip in the center of the card, an FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array). The board generates ultrasound control signals and processes the return echoes for DSP (digital signal processing) analysis by the ETX computer.

Gory Details: Shaped ultrasound wavefronts are created in software on the ETX computer and turned into electrical pulses by this card. A companion card amplifies these pulses and delivers them to an ultrasound probe. The probe converts the pulses into very high frequency sound waves which enter patient tissue. Much like radar, soundwaves strike bone, muscle, cysts, or other tissue and create an echo. The same probe "listens" to these echos and converts them back into electrical signals. These signals are amplified slightly and then passed back into this control card. Special amplifiers on the control card account for the logarithmic loss of sound strength in human tissue. The signals are then digitized by a bank of ADCs (Analog to Digital Converters) and stored in a wide memory bank on the card. The ETX computer then extracts and analyzes the digitized echoes to create an ultrasound image on an LCD screen or VGA monitor.

This board contains nine different power supplies to run the various integrated circuits, the computer, the companion card, the LCD screen, and the ultrasound probe. Two USB ports are also provided. The card can be powered by two separate smart batteries, and reports their charge status and other details to the ETX computer. A compact flash connector on the underside of the card contains the software used to run the ETX computer under the Linux operating system.

This board is a "serious" level project.