A prototype ultrasound sector B-scanner has been developed where the front-end hardware refers to all the necessary circuits for transmitting the ultrasound pulses into the human body and receiving the reflected echo signals from it. The front-end hardware can generally be divided into three parts, i.e., a pulse generator for insonification, a receiver which is responsible for processing of low-level analog signals, and a steering controller for driving the mechanical sector probe whose functions and design concepts are described in this paper. The front-end hardware is implemented which incorporates the following features: improvement of the axial resolution using a circuit which reduces the ring-down time, flexibility of generating time-gain compensation curve, and adoption of a one-chip microcomputer for generating the rate pulses based on the sensor output waveforms.