Medical imaging is a growing segment of the medical market. X-ray, angiography, digital radiography and computer tomography are examples of medical applications requiring high-end LCD medical monitors.
Design Challenges At the heart of every monitor is a graphics controller board with one or more graphics controller chips (GDC). The GDC must support ultra high resolutions and various specifics of LCD displays that might be market news. Very often, in order to cover whole manufacturers’ line ups, designers of such graphics controller boards must use GDC chips utilizing different featur sets and coming from different sources.
This approach inevitably builds up a list of requirements and causes various design problems related to different PCBs used for different monitor models, IOs connectivity challenges, different SW support, increased maintenance problems, questionable long term availability, obsolescence problem, etc.
The Xylon Solution A quick insight look into a list of requirements exposes a design arena in which the FPGA technology fits perfectly. Today’s FPGA chips allow high-performance DSP processing by parallel execution of hardware implemented algorithms, offer unprecedented configurability and allow for an easy adoption of new and emerging IO standards.
Click Picture To Enlarge! Fast development time, time-to-market and relatively low NRE costs, combined with typical mid-size production volumes of the medical imaging systems, make the FPGAs very competitive in the design of graphics controller chips and boards.
Design from the scratch has not been a viable approach in designing advanced FPGA designs for a while. Strong and capable design teams use predefined function blocks or IP cores, which are either in-house developed or purchased from third-party IP providers. Xylon graphics
logicBRICKSTM IP cores allow quick assembly of a starting FPGA design, and concentration to missing details and additional IP cores tuning.
Read Customer Success Story: "Xylon logicBRICKS plug in EIZO GmbH High-End Medical Monitors" - Fast time-to-market and low NRE
- High cost/performance ratio
- Support for ultra-high display resolutions
- Support for new LCD technologies
- DSP processing of input video
- No silicon obsolescence
- Support for different IO standards
- Scalability at the PCB board and chip level
- Unified stock list
Read more about Xylon's solutions for the medical market: