DesignMED Resources: Human-Computer Interfaces (HCI)

ADI Product How-To: New Touch-Screen Controllers Offer Robust Sensing for Portable Displays
Touch-screen displays that sense the occurrence and location of a physical touch on the display area are increasingly being used to replace mechanical buttons. The latest controllers offer improved accuracy, lower power consumption, and result filtering. They can also sense temperature, supply voltage, and touch pressure, facilitating robust sensing for modern touch-screen displays.

Ventilation Application Sheet
Read how Texas Instruments' low-power and broad-appeal microprocessors and other technology control options help you meet all your ventilation equipment needs, as well as other vital medical system needs, in the Ventilation Application Sheet.

"Rules of the Road" white paper from ADI for High-Speed Differential ADC Drivers
Applications engineers are constantly bombarded with questions about driving high-speed ADCs with differential inputs. Selecting the right ADC driver and configuration can be challenging. To make the design of robust ADC circuits somewhat easier, we've compiled a set of common "road hazards" and solutions.

TI's New Medical Applications Guide
TI's new Medical Applications Guide helps you get your medical equipment design to market faster with system block diagrams for a broad range of medical electronics, component selection tables, device details and information about development tools and evaluation modules.

The Incredible Versatile Op Amp
As this paper from ADI shows us, Op amps are used in all aspects of medical equipment design, from dc to video, and from low level precision input to high power output. They buffer and smooth the inputs and outputs of data converters. Newer amplifiers handle differential signals, control gain, and have internal supplies to extend their signal range.

Actel SmartFusion, the Intelligent Mixed Signal FPGA
SmartFusion intelligent mixed signal FPGAs are the only devices that integrate an FPGA, an ARM Cortex-M3 processor, and programmable analog, offering full customization, IP protection, and ease-of-use. Based on Actel's proprietary flash process, SmartFusion devices are suited for hardware and embedded medical designers who need a true SoC that gives more flexibility than traditional fixed-function microcontrollers without the excessive cost of soft processor cores on traditional FPGAs.

Incredible Shrinking Medical Devices
Increasing healthcare costs, the prevalence of chronic diseases, an aging "baby boomer" community, and large emerging markets in countries such as China, India, and Brazil, are creating tremendous demand for affordable, robust, and reliable medical devices. In turn, medical device designers are exploring new technologies to improve the diagnostic and monitoring capabilities of next-generation devices. These changing features and requirements demand complex functionality in a small footprint, low power, high accuracy, and reliable operation.

Actel SmartFusion: Intelligent, Innovative Integration
The whole point of an FPGA is flexibility. We could also mention integration. But then there is cost savings. So the whole point of an FPGA is flexibility, integration and cost savings. Yet there is also power reduction. And then there's security… All these advantages (and others besides) have made FPGAs very popular over the years. Actel's family of SmartFusion chips takes all the traditional advantages of FPGAs and combines them with equally flexible analog circuitry and the world's most popular embedded processor.

Design Made Easy With Mixed-Signal FPGAs and State of the Art Software Tools
Since the early years of embedded processor design and FPGA design, silicon advancement and design techniques for each have evolved independently. This leads to two distinct design flows, styles, and engineering disciplines. The relatively recent addition of mixed‐signal FPGAs adds the complexity of analog into the mix. This paper examines the evolution path for FPGAs with embedded processors, and the design tools that support them, and considers whether engineers need to evolve their techniques to accommodate the integrated silicon or whether they can continue to manage their boundaries at the silicon level instead of the board level.