China's high-end medical imaging equipment market is growing rapidly, and the proportion of local design is increasing
In recent years, more and more good news has appeared in the field of medical electronics. The Chinese government's large-scale investment in the healthcare industry is conducive to promoting strong sales of medical electronic equipment. "Due to favorable factors such as the sustained and healthy development of China's economy and the increasing importance that the country attaches to the construction of the whole society's medical service system, China's medical electronics market will continue to grow steadily in the next few years, which will also bring medical electronic technology progress And development. "Zhou Wensheng, senior business manager of Asia-Pacific medical business at ADI, analyzed.
Figure 1: Zhou Wensheng: In clinical systems such as medical imaging, channel density is growing very rapidly. For example, the number of channels in ultrasound applications has increased to 128 or even 256 channels, and CT applications have been increased to 64 or more layers.
With the aging of China's population, the growth of people's wealth and the improvement of medical conditions and other factors, the demand for high-end electronic medical market has been promoted. These high-end medical equipment include diagnostic imaging equipment such as ultrasound, computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), positron emission tomography (PET), and X-ray equipment. Mainly for hospitals or professional medical clinics. In the high-end medical device market, the need for high-resolution and 3D imaging applications to replace 2D monochrome imaging devices will be even stronger. At the same time, China is constantly investing in the field of biomedicine, which is another application area for the growth of high-performance and high-reliability medical electronic equipment.
"At present, the market for high-end medical devices is still dominated by large foreign brands, but we see that domestic local companies are increasingly participating in the market competition. Some leading local companies have already ranked among the world's leading medical device suppliers Among them, such as Mindray. You can see the trend that more local R & D products will appear in the high-end medical application market in the future. On the other hand, in recent years, some leading foreign high-end medical device markets have also launched in China. R & D work, such as well-known manufacturers such as GE, Siemens and Philips have set up R & D centers in China, which has also led to the introduction of talents across the industry and the improvement of R & D capabilities in the Chinese market. "Texas Instruments (TI) China High-Performance Analog Products Business Development Manager Song Haoran pointed out.
In addition, He Yingwei, marketing manager of Freescale Semiconductor Industry, pointed out that domestic and international suppliers of hospital equipment, especially medical imaging and diagnostic products, are expected to be greatly promoted in the next few years. In order to win government procurement tenders, most of these companies have developed low-end product portfolios, and even developed low-end products for previous high-end equipment such as ultrasound and X-ray machines. Component suppliers, like product manufacturers, use lower-cost models to support government projects.
For all kinds of high-end imaging medical equipment, the application is different, and the focus is different, which also leads to different requirements for semiconductor devices. The following discusses different requirements from two aspects of analog devices and digital devices.
The latest requirements of different equipment for analog IC
"Ultrasonic systems require a very large number of channels, with a minimum of nineteen channels and a maximum of hundreds of channels. CT applications have strict requirements on current signals and the number of channels." TI Song Haoran pointed out. For ultrasound imaging applications, the AFE58XX analog front-end series has been specially developed. The AFE58xx series combines multiple high-performance analog components into a fully integrated analog front end, providing high-quality image quality for a variety of ultrasound applications. Compared to similar devices on the market, the device is smaller than half their size and consumes less power, while still maintaining low noise, which allows portable and handheld ultrasound systems to have longer battery life and better image quality . "AFE5851 is the first 16-channel AFE in the ultrasound market," he said.
TI's DDC products are single-chip solutions for directly digitizing low-level currents in the photodiode array of CT scanners. Each DDC channel provides a dual switch integrator front end to process the current in the photodiode. This configuration allows continuous current integration (to avoid any loss of input signal): one of the integrator outputs will be digitized by the onboard A / D converter, and the other output will integrate the input current. In this series of products, DDC232 is a 32-channel current input analog-to-digital converter, and DDC114 is a 20-bit four-channel current input analog-to-digital converter. It has industry-leading performance and integration, especially focusing on the front-end analog device functions. It is inside, which greatly facilitates customer design.
ADI works hard on the number of channels. Zhou Wensheng pointed out: "In clinical systems such as medical imaging, the channel density is growing very rapidly. For example, the number of channels in ultrasound applications has increased to 128 or even 256 channels, and the number of CT applications has been increased to 64 or more layers. The size and mechanical / thermal limitations require the circuit to be small enough to meet the device size requirements, and the system power consumption also needs to be low enough (including heat dissipation considerations). "The requirements for higher accuracy and efficiency mainly refer to the processing accuracy and speed. Therefore, large medical equipment is developing towards higher channel density and / or higher channel processing speed. However, "the biggest challenge is the contradiction between high channel density and system size, and the contradiction between high processing speed and power consumption requirements." He pointed out, "ADI has foreseen this trend and began to invest a few years ago The development of new technologies will help resolve these contradictions and help medical device manufacturers realize their dreams. "
ADAS1128 is an excellent example of CT application. A few years ago, the mainstream CT was still 1-layer or 2-layer CT, but now 16- and 64-layer CTs are becoming more and more popular. This change not only provides better images, but also shortens patient scanning time and patient preparation time. "As a breakthrough technology introduced to the market in early 2009, ADAS1128 is a 128-channel current-to-digital converter that can help medical device manufacturers achieve higher-layer, small-size, and low-power CT products without reducing performance. "Said Zhou Wensheng. ADI has a good relationship with large medical system manufacturers, especially those leading customers in the industry, who can help ADI define appropriate products to meet market demand.
The latest demand for FPGA and DSP for medical imaging equipment
Paul Chan, marketing manager of Altera, pointed out that the basic image processing requirements of most imaging devices are similar, such as scalers, de-interlacing, color space conversion, alpha blending, gamma correction, image extraction, interpolation, chroma resampler, 2D / 3D filter, scan line buffer, and possibly H.264 image compression, etc. The difference between these diagnostic imaging devices lies in the core image processing algorithms. For example, CT is mainly a cross-sectional image, which requires correction of artifacts or distortion correction. Compared with X-ray, MRI is a better technology. These two technologies are mainly static images (for example, no motion or rotation processing), which requires more gradient processing. Ultrasound function requires strong DSP processing capability, complete beamforming, spectrum Doppler processing and motion processing, coloring or 3D ultrasound requires stronger DSP processing capability.
Figure 2: Paul Chan: It should be emphasized that the design reuse feature is very important, it shortens the development time, and promotes modular design, achieves a longer product life cycle, and supports product updates.
"It needs to be emphasized that the design reuse feature of using common image processing functions is very important, it shortens the development time, and promotes modular design, achieves a longer product life cycle, and supports product updates." He said. For example, StraTIx IV 40nm high-performance FPGA series provides rich LE, embedded memory and DSP modules, with high core and I / O performance, and supports the latest and fastest memory interface and transceiver signal integrity. Replacing multiple ASIC, ASSP, or DSP devices with true SOC solutions reduces cost and power consumption, reduces board area, and enables engineers to respond flexibly to changes in market demand. With the improvement of functions and the use of abundant DSP and memory resources, engineers can easily update to support H.264 encoding, which greatly improves performance.
Zhang Yuqing, director of marketing and applications for Xilinx in the Asia Pacific region, believes that FPGAs with embedded processors are very suitable as the core of highly integrated integrated systems in medical electronic systems. Xilinx ’s Virtex-5 FXT platform is an FPGA product that provides up to two industry-standard PowerPC 440 processor modules, plus high-performance DSP and high-speed SerDes, for high-resolution image processing and high-performance data analysis , High-speed data transmission equipment development is ideal. With Xilinx FPGAs, developers can also integrate their own dedicated IP. Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA products have been widely used in medical systems, including PCI express interface, SATA interface, Ethernet interface; high-speed data cache and high-speed look-up table; high-performance filters, beam forming, FFT and other core algorithms; ADC / DAC interface and various complex controls; image processing and display.
Figure 3: Douglas Hunter: The complexity of modern medical electronics requires not only a versatile FPGA, but also analog functions, power management and clock generation ICs to help manage the complexity of the system.
Douglas Hunter, vice president of marketing at Lattice, added: “Many factors are driving manufacturers to increasingly use source-synchronous interfaces, including the need to interface with high-speed ADCs and DACs. LatticeECP3 ’s sysIO buffers allow designers to easily integrate System I / O standards are connected to other devices. Of course, the complexity of modern medical electronics requires more than a versatile FPGA. Solving analog functions (such as in MRI equipment), providing power management and clock generation ICs to help manage The complexity of the system is also critical. For example, Lattice ’s mixed-signal Power Manager II series can implement a single-chip solution for circuit board power management, reducing board space requirements and improving reliability. At the same time, ispClock 5400D mixed-signal IC As a reference clock source for SERDES FPGAs including LatticeECP3. With ispClock5400D, you can use the clock source of the CMOS oscillator with lower cost and lower frequency, thereby reducing the overall execution cost.
In terms of DSP requirements, for ultrasound systems, DSP is used in Doppler processing, 2D, 3D and even 4D imaging and imaging systems for a large number of post-processing algorithms to increase functionality and improve performance. Some ultrasound systems require a high dynamic range or have functions that require multiple cycles. Examples of these functions are spectrum reduction and square root functions. When the ultrasonic solution requires an operating system, TMS320DM6446 can meet this demand. DM6446 not only has a powerful core and video accelerator (which can be used to handle imaging needs), but also has an ARM9? Core, which can meet the needs of running operating systems.
Another important DSP control function is ECG gating, which is used to reduce motion artifacts caused by beating heart. The data collection is completely synchronized with the heart beat. The Gigabit Ethernet transceiver used to connect to the PC can realize high-speed full-duplex point-to-point data transmission.
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