With greater awareness of health and wellness and the growing cost of healthcare around the world, increasing emphasis is being placed on new and advanced technologies for prevention, early diagnosis, and treatment. This trend towards miniaturization and portability for home, clinical, and imaging medical devices presents a significant opportunity for medical equipment designers to use FPGAs in developing efficient and flexible designs. Medical devices have high-reliability requirements, demand multi-functionality (integrated capabilities), require data logging and transmission capabilities—and yet must consume the lowest amount of power. Actel's flash-based, low-power FPGAs and mixed-signal FPGAs are the perfect fit for current trends in the medical market. For example, Actel's ultra-low power IGLOO devices can be utilized for any function, or integrate all the functions specified in the following block diagram.

Insulin Pump Block Diagram

Key Benefits of Actel FPGAs

• System power optimization with Actel's low-power IGLOO and ProASIC3 FPGAs and Fusion mixed-signal FPGA
• Highly reliable FPGAs for system-critical applications
• Unrivaled level of integration with Fusion mixed-signal FPGA and ARM® Cortex™-M1
• Minimum board size enabled by small-footprint packages (as small as 3x3 mm)
• Single-chip implementation offers lowest total system cost

Intellectual Property

Actel offers a range of IP cores for the development of portable applications, including the ARM Cortex-M1 FPGA processor. These flexible cores can be implemented in either Verilog or VHDL and are available for free in the Libero IDE catalog.
» Search for Medical IP cores

Technology Solutions
	Actel's flash-based FPGAs are low-power industry leaders. Combining inherent low-power flash characteristics with power optimization architectures extends the battery life more than 10x SRAM-based devices. » More
	Unlike SRAM-based FPGAs, Actel's flash-based technologies are inherently immune to functionality changes and configuration upsets caused by high-energy neutrons naturally generated in the earth's atmosphere. » More
	Actel's flash FPGAs are single chip and do not require additional nonvolatile memory to load the device configuration data at every system power-up, which reduces cost and increases security and system reliability.
	Flash FPGAs are already configured at power-up, which results in immediate system operation, as the device helps in system supervisory tasks. System design is greatly simplified, making the device available to perform critical system setup tasks and reducing bill-of-materials costs and PCB area. » More
Small Footprint Packages	Actel supports a variety of small-footprint packages as small as 4x4 mm, which enable high I/O density in a minimal board space.
System Management	ARM-enabled IGLOO, ProASIC3, and Fusion devices achieve cost-effective system power and thermal management by controlling and monitoring power supplies for total system power considerations at the board level. » More
	The flash FPGA configuration cannot be read back or exposed, which secures the company's IP, brand, and business. Actel flash FPGAs support secure in-system programmability (ISP) features that help implement secure remote-field upgrade and up-sell changes. » More
Lowest Unit and Total System Cost	The integration of high-end features in a single-chip flash-based FPGA, fabricated on an advanced process geometry leads to low unit cost and the lowest total system cost compared to other PLDs. » More

Actel Comprehensive Power Analysis Tools

Actel provides accurate, comprehensive power analysis tools for its FPGAs, which offer accurate prediction and give straightforward analysis of design options to help meet your portable system needs.

SmartDesign's block system builder design entry tool enables you to quickly assemble, connect, and integrate pre-designed library cells, DirectCores, and user created HDL into a single synthesizeable HDL file, which can significantly reduce your FPGA design time and system time-to-market.

The pre-netlist Power Calculator tool helps in analyzing design implementation options for rapid power analysis scenarios and design partitioning.

The netlist-based SmartPower tool can help in quickly managing and optimizing designs to the product's lowest power capabilities. This power analysis tool provides a comprehensive interface for easily realizing the static and dynamic power performance of a portable design. Power reports are broken down by net, gate, I/O, memory, clock, core static, instance, and power rail. A design-level power summary includes average switching activity, ambient temperature, and junction temperature readings, offering the ability to optimize FPGA power and behavior to reduce total system power.

Learn more about Libero IDE flows and tools.

Actel Hardware Platforms

Actel and its partners offer a variety of development and evaluation platforms to enable quick and easy portable design.

Actel's IGLOO Starter Kit and Cortex-M1-enabled IGLOO Starter Kit demonstrate the low-power capabilities of the device, including low-power static, active, and Flash*Freeze mode operation. The starter kit also has the ability to operate the IGLOO or M1 IGLOO device with 1.2 V or 1.5 V.

The ProASIC3 Starter Kit and Cortex-M1-enabled ProASIC3 Starter Kit are complete solutions that enable quick evaluation of Actel ProASIC3 and M1 ProASIC3 device families and design prototyping. The ProASIC3 Starter Kit comes in two versions. The first version is for prototyping, and the second, lower-cost version is for simple evaluation.

The all-inclusive Fusion Starter Kit and Cortex-M1-enabled Fusion Starter Kit contain everything you need to fully experiment with Fusion's mixed-signal FPGA capabilities. These kits provide a complete platform for the development of systems with Fusion or M1-enabled Fusion devices.

In addition, Actel and its partners provide several hardware platforms for evaluating common interfaces used in portable electronics and integrating proven IP cores into their final design. These platforms offer the benefits of rapid prototyping, rapid time-to-market, and reduced design time and costs.

For device-related documents, visit the IGLOO, ProASIC3, and Fusion Documentation pages.

Application Briefs

	AC242: Low-Power FPGAs in Home-based Medical Devices App Brief		257 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	AC244: Mixed-Signal FPGAs in Clinical Applications App Brief  Hemodialysis Machine		279 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document

Product Information Brochures (PIB)

	Solutions for the Medical Equipment Market Brochure		594 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Fusion Brochure		1.0 MB	3/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	IGLOO Low-Power Flash FPGAs Brochure		584 KB	11/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	ProASIC3 Flash Family FPGAs Brochure		2.0 MB	11/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Industry's Lowest Power FPGAs Fact Sheet		147 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Power Top Ten		177 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Total System Power Brochure		493 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Total System Cost Brochure		441 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document

Selector Guides

Actel FPGA Package and Selector Guide

937 KB

11/2008

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White Papers

	Competitive Programmable Logic Power Comparison White Paper			4/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Incredible Shrinking Medical Devices White Paper		397 KB	10/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	Reducing System Power White Paper		34 KB	8/2006	Click on the to rate this document
	The Many Flavors of Low-Power, Low-Cost FPGAs White Paper		529 KB	4/2008	Click on the to rate this document
	The New "Power-Smart" Power Paradigm White Paper		216 KB	7/2007	Click on the to rate this document