Beamforming

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I have a stream of 50 transducers and want to apply beamforming to the data coming from it. I have ADCs connected to each transducer.

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What is a 'stream of 50 transducers'? I assume you mean you just have 50 transducers.

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Q#1: DO i need to see for the ADC giving real and imaginary I and Q aprts or this is not important for the Beamforming?

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It depends on what you are sampling. If you are sampling the output of the transducer directly, then there are only real-valued samples. If your transducer includes a mixer, then the output of the mixer could be complex-valued, so then you would need real and imaginary samples.

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After the ADC, there are deserializers which give 8 bit output . Now i need to implement the beamforming. I want to design it for an aperture size of 8 and sampling frequency of 25Mhz. I want to apply simplest delay and sum beamforming. As far as i could study, the weights are same for the simplest kind. But i need to add delay which again i could understand is the phase delay or its the time delay??

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Your terminology is a little strange here. How many of the transducers do you want to phase up (usually it would be all of them)? How many beams do you want to form?

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Please if some one could help in implementing this basic beamformer using verilog.

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Before you even start to code, you need to describe your system much better.

What are your transducers? Ultrasonic, radio frequency?

What frequency do they operate at? What is the transducer bandwidth? Eg., an ultrasonic device might have a 100kHz carrier with a 20kHz signal, whereas an array of radio receivers could have a 100MHz carrier and 20MHz bandwidth (or much higher).

What is your ADC?

Are you transmitting and receiving, eg., like a radar application, or is this a passive beamformer?

Regarding whether the beamforming is a delay or phase-shift, it is a delay operation. If your bandwidth-to-carrier ratio (the Q of the system), is high, you might be able to treat delay (a phase slope in the spectral domain) as a phase-shift. This will cause a degradation in the result, but it might be acceptable.

Cheers,

Dave