Conventional thinking would make one believe that ASICs may be economically impractical for medical applications – up to now. Traditionally, ASICs were reserved for high volume consumer electronics or perhaps for mid-volume, but highly sophisticated, system-on-a-chip (SoC) devices for telecommunication infrastructure applications. Lower volume spaces such as medicine were confined to using FPGAs. Times have changed, and the technology and the economy of scale have adapted. High volume markets such as laptops, cellular phones, and portable media players have driven technology and technology price points down. The level of sophistication for consumer electronics chips is such that a cellular phone SoC performs the complete applications processing, wireless telecommunications protocol stack, the non-volatile memory, as well as the radio in one single chip. Just a couple of years ago, these functions would have been integrated using a multi-chip module sometimes called system in a package (SiP).

Medical and bio-medical technologists can leverage the recent advances in IC technologies.   Growing applications such as home health monitoring systems ( like the one just announced by Intel) is gaining high rate of adoption in the health care of seniors. Progress is being made in the newly formed IEEE standards committee for wireless body area networks (WBAN) which looks at applications such as implantable or wearable sensors.  There are numerous new products hitting the markets for implantable databases, implantable and non-implantable physiological sensors, swallowable camera pills , and high-speed image processing engines are now economically feasible to implement using SoCs and SiPs . The requirements for these applications also vary; power and form factor are of utmost importance for implantable devices, whereas highly integrated solutions and computationally intensive DPS engines are desired for medical imaging. This talk will detail some of the recent advances in IC and IC packaging technology, and will highlight some of the medical applications that they are enabling.