2020 was such a special year. Due to the pandemic, this New Year could not be celebrated with friends and family like in previous years. Everyone chose to stay at home, waiting for good news like they await spring. While ordinary people manage and protect themselves, we also see the admirable healthcare workers, the most beautiful reverse fighters in this war without gunpowder, battling on the front lines with faith and responsibility, protecting everyone. In addition to effective protective measures, advanced and reliable medical equipment is also a necessary “weapon” to win this war. Medical imaging, patient monitoring, vital signs monitoring, and blood oxygen cardiac diagnostic equipment can effectively assist healthcare personnel in treating patients. Moreover, more portable devices are used in early prevention, detection, and early treatment. Among them, electronic components play a crucial role in the development of medical devices. Sensors, power management, and wireless connectivity are key to data measurement and transmission, while processors are the key components for computation and data analysis.
Most medical electronic devices can find ST MCU products, such as monitoring devices and testing equipment. Especially in portable medical and personal healthcare products, such as infrared thermometers, blood glucose and oxygen meters, and blood pressure monitors, ECG, etc. In medical health devices, the low power consumption and high performance, and multi-connectivity of MCUs are crucial, so our STM32L (ultra-low power series), STM32F4 and STM32H7 series high-performance products are mainstream solutions for medical electronics. Taking the STM32F4 series based on the ARM Cortex M4 core as an example, it is currently the mainstream infrared thermometer solution. The main frequency can run up to 180MHz, and it integrates 2MB FLASH and 256KB of RAM, while also integrating 3 independent 12-bit ADC, supporting a sampling frequency of 2.4M, as well as an LCD-TFT controller. During this special period, the demand for infrared thermometers has suddenly exploded, and many of our clients and partners are ramping up production to meet market demand. We are also actively coordinating our product supply, working together to provide support during this special time.
Block diagram of STM32-based healthcare products
(Click the image to enlarge)
Our medical resources are indeed tight and scarce. Therefore, the diversity and professionalism of remote medical, community, and home monitoring devices have placed more demands on chips. With the development of technology and the continuous evolution of processes, our MCUs have been continuously enhanced in integration and performance. We have successively launched dual-core MCU products with a main frequency of up to 480MHz, and higher performance MPU products based on the ARM Cortex-A7 core, STM32MP1 series. At the same time, we have also integrated SoC products based on BLE and other 2.4G multi-protocol wireless connectivity solutions, such as STM32WB, providing reliable and feasible solutions for remote medical care and portable monitoring.
While providing convenience, the security of personal information for these medical and health-related units is also very important. ST has always been concerned about data security and information protection. To this end, we have also launched STM32Trust, as an effective measure to help protect embedded systems securely.
In addition to the products themselves, we are also investing more resources in solution development. We now have a complete GUI solution based on TouchGFX (graphic display design software) that can help customers quickly realize optimized products from design ideas to market-ready. It supports screens from QVGA to 1080P, and the latest optimized design allows low-power MCUs to support 60FPS animations and various colors and details display. We have also further launched STM32CubeIDE, which integrates the functions of CubeMX and provides a one-stop design and development environment that includes code editing, compiling, debugging, and downloading functionalities.
In this special period, we have seen many AI-based robots serving on the medical front lines. In such systems, STM32 also participates in multiple control parts, from human-machine interaction (HMI), robotic arm control, to motor drives for mobile control. Based on the STM32Cube.AI tool, we provide a comprehensive solution from hardware, software, and tools. With a deep focus on high performance, low power consumption, and multi-connectivity, we can foresee that STM32 will play a stronger role in the field of artificial intelligence.
With the rapid development of remote medical care, community hospital services, and cloud medical services, for STM32, high performance and reliability are the main reliance for these medical electronic products to provide effective data. At the same time, STM32‘s low power consumption supports the usability and ease of use of products. In addition, the rich ecosystem of STM32 and numerous application solution partners can provide customers with more complete solutions and accelerate product time to market. In terms of production capacity, ST is also continuously investing to flexibly respond to sudden product demands and meet customer production tasks.