The Trend of MCU Used in Portable Medical Devices

With the continuous population aging, increase of health awareness as well as the implementation of new medical reform policy, portable/home medical electronics surges, showing sizable growth room, which also drives the demand for MCU chip.

Due to the specialty of medical market, MCU manufacturers should pay attention to the following trends:

First: large storage and processing capacity. In order to store more data, such as a patient’s test data a month ago, medical equipment should be equipped with high performance, graphics display capabilities, storage capacity and support wireless connectivity, which requires MCU to have stronger processing power, higher parallel processing capabilities as well as highly integrated, fast and accurate computing power, as such, 8-bit MCU will be replaced by 16-bit, 32-bit MCU. Previously, MCU was separated from GPU, but with home medical equipment reducing design size, the future integration becomes a direction.

Second: low power. For home medical devices, power consumption is very important. For instance, nurses usually will pay visit to many families a day, so the carried medical equipment should have a day of battery life, which poses high requirement for ultra-low power consumption design of power management chip.

Third: security. To prevent hackers accessing to patients’ data, encryption technology must be added into chip, enabling it of recognition function. For medical electronic solution suppliers, catching and grasping the relevant standards, certification and implementing them in the solution design and management can brings more competitiveness than adding functionalities.

Fourth: remote chip management. Remotely upgrading and deleting patient information via internet needs stronger secure communications capabilities in MCU.

Fifth: multi-MCU operating and inter-communicating capacity. Given devices moving toward complex and multi-functional, equipment often provides multiple MCUs; the communication between them is very important. So industry should establish standard MCU communication protocol.

Sixth: support exchange standard of medical data, especially HL7V3 standard, so equipment can directly access public health information network.

Seventh: combine sensor and MCU.