Medical and Healthcare Devices
As the health care industry begins to enable self monitoring by patients, there has been a dramatic increase in the types of portable health care devices. These may be for medical diagnostics or health and wellness. Long battery life, highly-accurate analog measurements, highly-reliable wired and wireless connectivity and small form factors are just a few of the requirements that are critical in medical equipment design.
Silicon Labs’ medical solutions portfolio has been designed to meet these challenging requirements. Our products include the industry’s lowest power MCUs, a complete family of USB connectivity products, industry-leading ISM band transceivers, highly-reliable digital isolators, low-power LCD controllers and innovative human interface products that enable proximity and capacitive sensing.
RF-to-USB2 Reference Design
By pairing the lowest power MCU with the highest performance wireless transceiver, Silicon Labs offers a solution with superior current consumption, size, receive sensitivity and transmit power. The two-board RF-to-USB2-RD reference design wirelessly streams data from a transmit board to a computer via a USB dongle. The reference design comes with complete hardware schematics, Gerber files, software GUI, and MCU firmware — all freely available for customer reuse.
Isolation in Medical and Healthcare Devices
Electromagnetic Interference (EMI) can corrupt operation of certain medical devices, these products can malfunction or fail in the presence of a strong RF field, resulting in dire consequences for the patient. RF Interference (RFI) can come from portable communications and even some medical systems using RF energy for diagnosis or treatment (e.g. MRI) and/or communication which can be hazardous and hard to contain.
Achieving robust EMI rejection and low emission is challenging, this impacts circuit design, layout, shielding and component selection. Electronic medical electronic equipment often requires galvanic isolation for safety, voltage level shifting or ground noise mitigation. And while many factors determine medical system EMI performance, transformer-based isolators in particular are prone to data corruption in the presence of moderate amounts of EMI. Silicon Labs portfolio of Si84xx isolators are virtually EMI immune and have a high voltage lifetime of up to 60 years even under worst case conditions (150 °C).
Download this White Paper to find out what you need to know about EMI and how to minimize the effects of EMI in medical electronic applications using digital isolation.
| EMI: Emissions and Immunity |
Lowest emissions and highest noise immunity among digital isolators |
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| 5 kVrms Safety Ratings |
Safety certified at UL, CSA and VDE as well as IEC60601-1 compatibility |
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| High Reliability |
100 years typical high voltage lifetime, 87 years MTTF |
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Security of Supply
Silicon Labs is committed to product support. We understand that long product life cycles are required in medical applications, and we have built a solid reputation as a supplier that delivers quality products with proven long-term reliability. Industry-standard fabrication processes are used to reduce risk and provide cost-effective solutions.
- Traceability — All Silicon Labs production status parts are marked with manufacturer designations.
- Quality and Reliability — Silicon Labs is registered to the following standards:
ISO 9001, ISO 14001 and adheres to JEDEC and JESD47. Monitoring programs are in place.
- End-of-Life — Silicon Labs conforms to JESD48 standard.