Embedded Medical Systems from Sarsen Technology Ltd

Medical systems often have very demanding technology and support requirements.

MRI scanners, CT scanners and ultrasound imaging systems typically require powerful data acquisition, digital signal processing and data recording solutions. Sarsen understand that medical customers have special requirements, so we supply high speed data acquisition and powerful embedded computing hardware, specifically for these kinds of applications.

Sarsen Technology represents a range of US manufacturers with a proven track record in supplying high reliability solutions to the medical industry.

Conduant’s  Big River™ RTX16 Digital Recording System is configured to provide clients with StreamStor ® high-speed recording and play-back technology, built into a heavy-duty industrial 19” rack-mount chassis that includes a PCI backplane for COTS component flexibility, a set of individually removable hard disk drives for data storage and an onboard Dual Core Xeon Server that can be used to handle command and control as well as data manipulation. The Big River™ RTX16 recording chassis configurations provide clients with 16 removable hard disk drives for multiple terabytes of data storage capacity and can be used to support a variety of data streaming applications such as medical imaging. 

BittWare’s hybrid signal processing boards provide an ideal solution for medical imaging systems designers. These boards provide the programming flexibility of an FPGA with the number-crunching power of a DSP, integrated by an innovative architecture – BittWare’s ATLANTiS Framework, allowing system designers to use both to their full advantage to get their products to market quickly and cost-effectively.

United Electronic Industries (UEI) has worked with NASA, supplying the UEIPAC Cube to perform an essential role in controlling the COLBERT treadmill in the new space station exercise facility. The astronauts need the treadmill both for exercise and for maintaining bone density in a gravity-free environment. Some of the functions monitored by the UEIPAC are characteristics of the astronaut’s gait and foot impact forces while exercising on the treadmill. This is determined by sensing data of various types from accelerometers and load cells in the treadmill and associated restraining equipment.

The COLBERT treadmill tested during a zero-gravity flight

For more information on how Sarsen can help you find the right solution for your medical application please call us on +44 1672 511166, or drop us an email: info@sarsen.net.

High Frequency Trading speak to CEO Jeff Milrod about BittWare's FPGA development for the Low-Latency Financial Market

High performance computing using FPGA technology is a key technology for the financial services industry. High frequency automated financial trading uses models and simulations to provide real-time assistance in decision making. 

BittWare has designed and developed a family of PCIe format Altera Stratix V FPGA hardware optimised for this market. BittWare CEO Jeff Milrod has been speaking to High Frequency Traders about how this technology has made the low-latency financial market very excited.....

HFT: BittWare has been in business for quite a while, but you’ve only got into the financial space comparatively recently. How did this come about?

Jeff Milrod: "We’ve been producing commercial off-the-shelf signal processing boards and high performance computing boards since 1989 and they’ve been used in a wide variety of markets over the years.

Military is big component of our business as are wireless telecommunications, high-end instrumentation and medical imaging. More recently, we’ve actually had the finance market come to us. In the last couple of years it has decided that FPGAs are very attractive platforms for reducing the latency and increasing the performance of a lot of their applications. It just so happens that we have some of the best FPGA boards in the world. We were approached by financial market customers who thought our engines could work very well for them, so we’ve been working hard to learn more about the market and to figure out how to modify our boards slightly and add additional IP to create better solutions for the finance space.

One thing that’s unique about what we do, particularly compared to some of our competitors in the finance market, is that we consider ourselves a horizontal enabling technology. It’s expressed in our slogan ‘Essential building blocks…Innovative solutions.’ We want to provide building blocks for our customers and allow them to add the unique vertical application-specific value themselves. We don’t believe that’s our role. There’s a commonality across all markets for the underlying processing engines – be they implemented with signal processors or FPGAs – with relation to high speed data movement, power conditioning and control, thermal management and obsolescence management for deployed world class system solutions."

The full interview can be found here - High Frequency Traders.

Please give us a call on +44 1672 511166 if you would like any more information!

Altera Stratix® V GX/GS PCIe Board with VITA 57 FMC I/O Site or Dual QSFP+. Copyright BittWare.

White Paper: Tech Source - Using Graphics Chips for General Purpose Computing

Just uploaded to the Sarsen Technology web site is a new white paper from Tech Source. It details how graphics chips become more powerful and how the power of these GPUs can be harnessed. While typical CPUs can process one single stream of commands per core, a modern graphics chip can process hundreds of simple floating point operations at the same time. The benefits of this translate directly into many applications where thousands of complex vector equations are required to be performed every second.

Read the Tech Source white paper: here.

Altera's 28-nm Variable-Precision DSP Block Architecture Wins the 2011 DesignVision Award

San Jose, Calif., February 2, 2011—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) today announced that its variable-precision digital signal processing (DSP) block architecture won the DesignCon 2011 DesignVision Award in the Semiconductor and IC category. Altera's variable-precision DSP block architecture was recognized by DesignVision Award judges for its ability to enable high-precision, high-performance digital signal processing in FPGAs that efficiently supports many different precision levels. This unique architecture is implemented within Altera's portfolio of 28-nm FPGAs to increase system performance, reduce power consumption and reduce architecture constraints for DSP algorithm designers. Altera was presented with the 2011 DesignVision Award at a ceremony held at the Santa Clara Convention Center during DesignCon 2011.

Altera developed the industry's first variable-precision DSP block architecture to meet the industry's demands for higher precision signal processing. This innovative architecture allows each DSP block in the FPGA to be configured at compile time to three 9x9, two 18x18 or a single 27x27 or 18x36 multiplier mode. Additional higher precision modes are available using multiple DSP blocks. This architecture supports, on a block-by-block basis, various precisions per block, ranging from low resolution fixed point video up to single-precision floating point within a single DSP block, and even double-precision floating point with minimal external logic. To learn more about Altera's variable-precision DSP block architecture, or to view a white paper or webcast on the architecture, visit www.altera.com/dsp-variable-precision.

BittWare exhibiting at the RTS Embedded Systems Exhibition & Conference - Paris

Visit BittWare and EMG2 at the RTS Embedded Systems Exhibition & Conference - Porte de Versailles Paris - stand B16 and explore BittWare's signal processing products:

FPGA-computing and hybrid (FPGA+DSP) digital signal processing board-level solutions based on Altera's Stratix family of FPGAs

• Rugged (conduction cooled) and commercial (convection cooled) COTS compliant VPX, VME/VXS and CompactPCI boards ideal for military solutions in radar, sonar, SigInt and electronic warfare
• Commercial (convection cooled) AdvancedMCs combining the inherent flexibility of MicroTCA with a variety of VITA-57 FMCs (FPGA Mezzanine Cards) for processing and I/O expansion, encouraging hardware reuse and extending product lifecycles for communications solutions in wireless base stations, wireless network test equipment and Software Defined Radio (SDR) systems

Drastically saving development time and risk for FPGA application designers, BittWare's ATLANTiS™ FrameWork for FPGAs provides physical interfaces to I/O and memory, data moving engines, and resource arbitrators along with standard data flow and control fabrics that allow everything to be easily connected and controlled - easing implementation of complex signal processing solutions on FPGAs.