Five microcontrollers launched for medical apps

PORTLAND: On Tuesday (April 27) Freescale Semiconductor made an announcement regarding five microcontrollers for medical applications at the Embedded Systems Conference, which promise a system-on-chip approach to handheld medical device operation.

The company said that Ultralow-current modes in the Flexis MCUs let up to five-year battery lifetimes. Freescale in addition guarantees that it would produce the chips for 15 years to sustain the extended product life spans of medical devices.

John Weil, global product and enablement manager at Freescale said, "The actual secret sauce is the measurement engine has been added to substitute an application's requirement for distinct components,". This integrated measurement engine meets the application necessities for blood glucose meters, heart rate monitors and other diagnostic and therapeutic medical equipment.

The engine consists of a 16-bit analog-to-digital converter, 12-bit digital-to-analog converter, high-precision voltage reference, analog comparator, transimpedance amplifiers, operational amplifiers, programmable reference (low-power wakeup) and programmable delay block (for synchronizing A/D and D/A operations).

The microcontrollers shall feature either 8- or 32-bit data paths in addition to options for LCD drivers and USB, using the Personal Health Care Device USB stack planned to the Continua Health Organization standards.

Weil said the medical microcontrollers are priced low at "just a few dollars" and "can save up to $4" in bill-of-materials costs for the various medical systems. "All you require to do is include a biosensor", he said.

Freescale says its device meets the exactness requirements laid by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and including two tri-amps and two op amps to meet FDA requirements for redundancy in the sensors used for medical apps.

Medical OEMs can prototype their gear making use of the Freescale Tower System modular development platform and CodeWarrior Development Studio software, and can organize their systems using the Freescale MQX real-time operating system.