EnSilica unveils customizable wireless medical sensor chip

By Gina Roos, editor-in-chief

Custom ASIC design company EnSilica has unveiled a customizable, single-chip medical sensor ASIC platform  with a machine learning (ML) accelerator to help speed the development of mass-market advanced wearable medical and fitness vital-sign−monitoring products. The company claims that the eSi-MediSense  ASIC is the industry’s first single-chip medical sensor with wireless capability, helping to drive down the cost of health-monitoring devices.

The ultra-low-power platform works with multiple processor and DSP configurations. It offers an optional ML accelerator such as the Arm Ethos-U55 that enables artificial intelligence to be designed into medical sensors, which helps reduce the frequency of wireless communication and extend battery life.

The platform works with a range of sensors, supporting the measurement of ECG, heart rate, respiration rate, pulse oximetry, and temperature. There also is an interface for electrochemical-based measurements, such as amperometric, voltammetric, or impedance. Additional custom sensor interfaces are available to integrate custom sensors or run smart diagnostic and remote health-care applications on a single chip.

Sensor data is encrypted and transmitted over either the 2.4-GHz ISM band radio (Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/proprietary and medical), a sub-1-GHz MBAN standard, or an ultra-low-power standard such as BLE 5.0 or 802.15.4. An NFC-A tag can be integrated to simplify device pairing and enable medical sensor data to be read by a smartphone. Data is encrypted on the chip using crypto accelerators: AES-256, SHA-512, and ECC-384 with a true random-number generator (NIST 800-22).

The platform supports a range of real-time operating systems, including FreeRTOS, SafeRTOS, ThreadX, and eBed OS, and offers a feature-rich DSP software library for easy algorithm programming. The eSi-MediSense platform is available in a low-pin-count QFN or B/LGA packaging options or a bare die for flip-chip bumping directly onto the PCB.