Medical electronic platform choices: FPGA, DSP, ARM, or GPU X86? (1)

"MINDRAY for processor platform choice has two seemingly contradictory principles: the ' many ' and ' less '.

Where ' number ' refers to the diversity that we know neither the DSP, ARM, X86 or FPGA, GPU, each platform has its own advantages and drawbacks, so you can design products in accordance with their characteristics to select and match, the processor platform diversity and rational collocation can make products more competitive. "In the recently held the third China International Medical Electronics Assembly (CMET2010), Shenzhen MINDRAY bio-medical electronics hardware Technical Committee Executive Director, systems engineer, Yao and shared MINDRAY select processor platform's secrets," ' little ' refers to the greatest extent possible to reduce processor types, multiple processor platform will not only lead to trouble for manufacturing, research and development will greatly increase the human and capital inputs, each with a new processor platforms need to buy new software, training engineers and so on. Thus the tradition of MINDRAY is the first use of the processor platform to be successful in multiple products repeatedly apply, if you want to use a new processor, it must be approved by the technical committee hearings. ”

According to introduction, Yao force MINDRAY's star product portable color ultrasound is used in the M7 X86, FPGA, DSP and ARM, and so on multiple platforms with different work, of which the primary processor performance and prices are high for the Intel CORE 2 duo, signal processing using computing capacity more powerful FPGA and DSP together, the Panel adopts Nios II, power part of the use of the low-end of the ARM7 series products, fully embodies the MINDRAY select processor platform principles of "more".

Another principle of "least" is reflected in the same series of products once selected processor, future generations will use the same platform, almost never do.

M7: MINDRAY medical electronic processor platform choices in the "more"

Unified platform reuse: medical electronics processor platform choices in the "little"