Medical Electronics

Component distributor, and manufacturer, Solid State has bought optoelectronic component company, Pacer.  Solid State is reported to have paid $3.7million for Pacer, which has offices in Pangbourne and Weymouth in the UK and a US subsidiary in Florida. Founded in 1971, Solid State manufactures computing, power and communications products in addition to component distribution. Pacer will bring custom design and increase ...

‘Explore’ is a body scanner that combines positron emission tomography (PET) and x-ray computed tomography (CT). The idea, 13 years ago, of University of California Davis scientists Simon Cherry and Ramsey Badawi, it can produce an image in as little as one second – because, according to the University, the machine captures radiation far more efficiently than other scanners. Given time, ...

A flexible sensor can map blood oxygen levels over large areas of skin, tissue and organs.

For drug administration, pharmaceutical electronics will play an increasingly important role

Continuous monitoring of health parameters by wrist-based devices is enabled by Maxim’s Health Sensor Platform 2.0. This  rapid prototyping, evaluation and development platform, delivers ECG, heart rate and body temperature to a wrist-worn wearable. Data can be stored on the platform for patient evaluation or streamed to a PC for analysis later. The data measurements collected by the HSP 2.0 ...

The University of Glasgow has used CMOS chip to analyse concentrations of four body chemicals that are indicators of disease, and has achieved results similar to standard NHS tests. The 3.4 x 3.6mm chips were designed on Cadence Virtuoso and fabricated at Austria microsystems on a 350nm triple-well process. On these, the active area is a 16 × 16 array sensors covering 1.6 x ...

A coin-sized flexible stick-on ultrasonic phased-array that allows blood pressure to be measured in arteries

Osram has introduced SFH 4776, a boadband infra-red in the firm’s 2.75 x 2.0 x 0.6mm high Synios package. The technology inside is a blue-emitting GaN die and phosphor converter, specially developed for spectroscopy, that converts the blue light into radiation across 650 to 1,050nm. “By making improvements to the phosphor material, developers at Osram Opto Semiconductors have succeeded in increasing the intensity ...

Simplifying the design of low-to-mid-power motor controls in the 7V-45V range

Instead of finger pricking, a miniature radar might one day tell diabetics what their blood-sugar level is, according to the University of Waterloo in Canada. “We want to sense blood inside the body without actually having to sample any fluid,” said engineer Professor George Shaker. “Our hope is this can be realised as a smart watch to monitor glucose continuously.” ...