The Development Trend of Medical Electronics Ⅰ
With the continuous aging population, the increase of national health awareness as well as the implementation of new medical reform policy, portable/family medical electronics have rapidly rose in recent years with very considerable growth space, this also drives the demand for MCU and other chips.
For currently home medical equipment, chip mainly includes MCU, some interface chip as well A / D converter, and some manufacturers integrate A/D into MCU. Since home medical equipments is simpler than hospital equipment in test complexity, for some mid and low-end products such as blood pressure monitors, blood glucose meters, 8-bit MCU is enough. But with the market development, there will show the following worthy trends:
First: a large amount of storage and processing capacities. To storage more data, such as a patient’s test data within more than one month, there are some relative complex equipment in the global market, such as ECG monitoring equipment required by American households, these equipments require medical devices to have higher performance, graphics display functions, large storage capacity, to support wireless connection, resulting in the corresponding MCU should equip with greater processing power, higher parallel processing capabilities, along with highly integrated, fast and accurate computing power, so 8-bit MCU will be displaced by 16-bit and 32-bit MCU. Previously, the MCU and graphics processing chip GPU is discrete, but with the design dimension of home medical equipments moving to further miniaturization, the future integration is also a trend.
Second: low power consumption. Home medical equipment poses very high requirements for power consumption. For instance, when nurses visit households with medical equipments, they may access many users a day, which requires the cell of medical equipment to maintain at least one day, further posing high requirements for the battery life, and power management chip should consider lower-power in design.