The Ultrawideband (UWB) imaging technique for breast cancer detection is based on the fact that cancerous cells have different\r\ndielectric characteristics than healthy tissues.When a UWB pulse in the microwave range strikes a cancerous region, the reflected\r\nsignal is more intense than the backscatter originating from the surrounding fat tissue. A UWB imaging system consists of\r\ntransmitters, receivers, and antennas for the RF part, and of a digital back-end for processing the received signals. In this paper we\r\nfocus on the imaging unit, which elaborates the acquired data and produces 2D or 3D maps of reflected energies.We show that one\r\nof the processing tasks, Beamforming, is the most timing critical and cannot be executed in software by a standard microprocessor\r\nin a reasonable time.We thus propose a specialized hardware accelerator for it.We design the accelerator in VHDL and test it in an\r\nFPGA-based prototype. We also evaluate its performance when implemented on a CMOS 45 nm ASIC technology. The speed-up\r\nwith respect to a software implementation is on the order of tens to hundreds, depending on the degree of parallelism permitted\r\nby the target technology.
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