Low noise input stage with adjustable gain

Vantage systems give you the ability to set the various input stage gains of the system such that the quantization noise of the digitizer (least significant bit) is just below the thermal floor, optimizing the dynamic range for weak signals.

Hardware accumulation, before DMA transfer to the host

To improve the SNR of the data, Vantage has an RF sample data accumulator which permits stacking
up to 1000 acquisitions prior to transfer. To prevent saturation by accumulating DC offsets, the researcher can subtract a pre-recorded data frame from each acquisition prior to accumulation.
This feature simply permits very rapid summing of the RF data (limited only by acoustic travel time) without any overhead of DMA.

“Receive-only” reconstruction, for imaging one-way acoustic emissions

Verasonics provides example scripts that modify the beamformer to only consider the one-way travel time from every point in the medium to the array.

Two levels of hardware synchronization for external devices

1) Vantage provides both input and output trigger capability, accurate to within one sample interval (RF sampling period), that are software programmable to occur anywhere in the acquisition sequence. Thus, the acquisition can be repeatably triggered by the laser flash, for example, but you can choose between primary or secondary triggering depending on which system component has the greatest repeatability.

2) Vantage also provides access to the 250 MHz system clock via an external connector, for development of phase accurate synchronization to the highest precision available (4 ns).