Circuit SeedTM, a family of building block circuits, will have a significant impact on the Internet of Things (IoT) within the healthcare industry. The Circuit Seed family of circuits is a big breakthrough for companies currently producing analog circuits especially for healthcare medical devices, sensors and wearables.
According to a market report from MarketReseach.com, the healthcare Internet of Things (IoT) market segment is poised to hit $117 billion by 2020. As big data analytics and innovative connections between software, hardware, sensors, and mobile devices will be used to capture patient needs and behaviours, there will be a significant demand for products that are smaller, more accurate and which use less power. The report also says that investment in the Healthcare IoT market segment will have one of the highest compounded annual growth rates during the next few years.
Mr. Waite, who has been holding high level discussions with companies in the analog semiconductor space, said he feels that Circuit Seed lives up to its ‘game changing’ status - and in the context of healthcare can really be called ‘life changing’.
Mr. Waite said, “I am more firmly convinced than ever that what we have with Circuit Seed will definitely have a significant impact on healthcare products of the future as the industry moves to personal devices, real time measurement and hybrid devices that provide not only diagnostics but also treatment. These will include smaller, more powerful circuits that need more flexible design, and need to run on very low power and generate less heat – key advantages of Circuit Seed.”
Circuit Seed circuits are simpler to work with and do not require matched pairs or current mirrors, and will function on 40nm or smaller integrated circuits. The overall circuits are insensitive to parametric changes, making precision designs without precision parts a reality. These circuits also run at logic speed and are self-biasing. They generally work over a large frequency range with high sensitivity and accuracy. Each benefit of the circuit design is not a trade off against other benefits but additive, in that you get all of the benefits, all of the time. Circuit Seed circuits will operate down to less than 0.1V using a 100% digital process.
Mr. Waite feels that the healthcare industry is a major area that could benefit from an invention family like Circuit Seed. The amount of analog data that needs to be collected in this space is rapidly growing; it includes clinical, wearables, remote monitoring data such as those for pacemakers, blood pressure and glucose levels. Analog is the real world and that means chemical and biological measures, light, imaging, sound, density, pressure, viscosity, rhythm - all of that as inputs and converted to outputs.
“Old school analog and analog in digital is obsolete. It’s way too expensive, big, clunky, energy thirsty, finicky and susceptible to failure – does that sound like it’s on your personal health care wish list?” added Waite.
IoT enables modeling of healthcare outcomes of huge patient populations as a comprehensive function of all these variables, and with the right products there is the opportunity to provide new insights into measuring and managing diseases which could include metabolic syndrome and cancer. “It’s really special to know that using the Circuit Seed family of circuits in new IoT healthcare devices will be saving lives in the future,” said Waite.
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