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 to improve the treatment and care of millions of patients worldwide, and to cure an increasing range of diseases. In turn, medical device designers are exploring new technologies from various industries to improve the diagnostic, monitoring, and therapeutic capabilities of next-generation devices.

Whether talking about home-based testing, monitoring and diagnostics, clinical equipment, or imaging applications, two trends have emerged to make medical devices more affordable and more accessible for patients: miniaturization and portability. Today, medical manufacturers are moving entire systems—from home-based and clinical devices to imaging applications—into a portable unit the size of a cell phone or smaller. What was once huge equipment tethered to a wall has become available in mobile clinics, ambulances, and in a doctor’s bag for house calls.

With the trends toward miniaturization and portability come implications for reliability, form factor, power consumption, and battery life when considering the semiconductor technologies used in medical applications.

Today’s medical instruments, from home-based and clinical applications to imaging devices, are often very complex and highly use-specific. However, in addition to their core elements, medical devices also include unique functional blocks to complete their task. These changing features and requirements, complex functionality in a small footprint, low power, high accuracy, and reliable operation make medical devices an excellent market for reprogrammable nonvolatile semiconductor technologies like mixed-signal and low-power flash-based FPGAs.