Prior to constructing ultrasound images out of raw radio-frequency (RF) data, the transducer pulse frequency must be removed from the data to prevent ripple artifacts in the image. There are a number of methods of demodulation in ultrasound although two ultrasound signal processing techniques are used predominately nowadays.
Last week I shared ideas, tips and suggestions that I believe increase the chances of being successful when designing printed circuit boards. Here’s a few more that come to mind.
I’ve been designing printed circuit boards for years now and have learned plenty of things I believe increase the chances of being successful. Here’s a handful of PCB Design Best Practices that come to mind. And another handful will appear in part two of this blog next week.
Digital Health: Floating Away Until very recently I would never have dreamed of using floating point computations in firmware. It required too heavy a penalty in code space and computation time. Suddenly the game changed considerably. Now there are a number of relatively inexpensive microcontrollers which have single-precision floating point capabilities implemented in hardware. Here […]
Working on medical devices involves a lot of science, regulation, process and other things that often don’t appeal to executives, entrepreneurs, or my children. On the other hand, my three year old son is really keen on trains.
Toyota’s recent $1.5 million jury awarded loss in an Oklahoma court illustrates it’s pretty much impossible to write software without some third party code creeping in. IEC62304:2006 calls this “Software of Unknown Provenance” or SOUP, referring to software with unknown safety-related characteristics, or developed under an unknown methodology. I know the situation very well. Operating Systems, code libraries […]
Last month the FDA issued a guidance document for RF wireless technology in medical devices. Not surprisingly, the FDA is recommending a risk-based approach to design, testing, deployment and maintenance of medical device development.
Throughout the development of a product there are technology-related project risks that have the potential to negatively impact budget and timeline. At StarFish, our development process defines medical device proof-of-concept (POC) prototypes to mitigate these risks, either by resolving the uncertainty one way or the other, or by testing the use of a new or […]
We’re all probably familiar with the following scenarios from sometime in our careers. Maybe we’ve just powered up the first populated sample of our new prototype PCB; it all seems to work fine. Two weeks later something smokes and we subsequently discover that one of the boost converters is unstable and killing downstream parts.
Invariably when developing a medical device, there will be technologies which are required and which have already successfully been implemented by others. Maybe it’s a circuit, like a DC/DC converter or even a single-board-computer; maybe it’s a software library or a particular logic implementation. It could be the choice of an existing communication protocol versus […]
Bjarne and Trevor have both written some compelling perspectives on the use of microcontroller firmware, particularly about how to constrain its scope. Here’s another perspective. Recently we had a discussion about a new product we’re developing and the role of firmware in it. Trevor suggested that the entire functionality could be achieved completely in logic […]
The simulation I’m talking about is the use of computers to numerically model the behaviour of a system, particularly an electronic or electromechanical one. Typically this is done using a tool called Spice, although often MATLAB, FreeMat or even a spreadsheet can be used effectively. This method allows detailed exploration of system performance over a […]