In this study, we address the increased computational demands of a frequency-diverse ultrasonic target detection system by developing a zero-phase IIR (ZP-IIR) filter. Several ZP-IIR filter types including Chebyshev-I, Chebyshev- II, and Butterworth were analyzed for their detection performance. The 4th-order filters with 8-bit quantized coefficients are shown to improve the flaw-to-clutter ratio by approximately 10 dB. Furthermore, the reduced adder graph algorithm is used for a hardware realization of ZP-IIR filters that does not require any dedicated multipliers. A small number of coefficients inherent to IIR filters and their multiplierless implementation provide efficient architecture suitable for compact, real-time ultrasonic imaging devices.