Life science and hospital equipment—such as spectrometers, centrifuges, protein analyzers, powered beds, surgical instruments, radiation equipment, and endoscopes—have varying requirements, from motor control to signal processing. Programmable logic devices have found homes in many of these products, and Altera sees increased adoption in emerging applications such as radiation equipment. The low-cost, high-performance, and reprogrammable capabilities of Altera FPGAs help you develop feature-rich products with superior flexibility and fast time-to-market.
Designed on an advanced, highly efficient architecture, Altera’s Cyclone™ FPGA series easily meets the price and performance requirements of these applications. Figure 1 shows how a Cyclone II FPGA can be used on a control board in an endoscope. Applications such as endoscopes could also use HardCopy® II structured ASICs. In higher-end equipment where serialization of gigabits of data is required, Alteras Stratix® GX and Stratix II GX devices are ideal.
Figure 1. Endoscope Using Cyclone II FPGA
For a high-performance, cost-efficient processing solution, Altera’s Nios® II family of embedded processors can be implemented in all mainstream Altera FPGAs, including Cyclone II devices. Nios II embedded processors can provide both motor control and signal processing capabilities, enabling designers to achieve performance over 200 DMIPs and spend as little as $0.35 on logic.
