Despite how much things have changed over the past year due to the global pandemic, impacting people’s lives at home and at work, the electronics industry stepped up to the plate and kept swinging for home runs. We looked at over 100 great products across 10 product categories to bring you Electronic Products’ 45th Annual Product of the Year Awards.
Product categories include analog ICs, digital ICs, electromechanical, interconnects, optoelectronics, passives, power, RF/microwave, sensors, and test and measurement. These award-winning products demonstrate a significant advancement in a technology or its application, an exceptionally innovative design, a substantial achievement in price/performance, improvements in design performance, and/or the potential for new product designs/opportunities.
There was one tie this year for digital ICs between two AI chips. The winners are Eta Compute’s ECM3532 AI multicore processor and Maxim’s MAX78000 network accelerator chip. There were also some outstanding runner-ups. Click here for complete information on the winners and runner-ups.
Also in this issue is a look at innovations in the health-care industry. 2020 was a big year for the internet of medical things (IoMT), with Covid-19 highlighting the need for improved telehealth services and remote health-care monitoring. In a way, the global pandemic accelerated the design chain needed to drive to the next level of health-care technologies.
The move to IoMT devices also underscores the industry’s move toward partnerships and the new challenges and greater design complexity that OEM medical designers face.
IoMT applications range from clinical and home monitoring to wearable health-care devices — a wide range of products and applications requiring a greater range of technology implementations. These include fitness trackers that are becoming increasingly more accurate thanks to sensing technologies.
One of the big areas of change is in medical wearables, and CES 2021 was a showcase for some of these products. Heart health is high on the list of chronic diseases that are getting full attention from OEM medical product designers.
One of those companies is Omron Healthcare, which launched a collection of remote blood-pressure–monitoring services and tools. Anne-Françoise Pelé, editor-in-chief of EE Times Europe, walks us through some of those products, including Omron’s VitalSight, a remote patient-monitoring service that aims to send patients’ data securely and in real time to the clinician’s electronic medical record system.
Nitin Dahad, editor-in-chief of Embedded, reports on Leman Micro Devices’ standalone pocket keyfob-sized device, based on the company’s V-sensor, that claims to deliver clinically accurate personal blood pressure measurements, as well as other vital signs, displayed on a smartphone via Bluetooth. LMD said that the V-Sensor is a major step forward beyond current fitness-tracker–type wearable devices and is medical-grade technology with clinically accurate results.
Majeed Ahmad, editor-in-chief of EDN, concurs that Covid-19 has provided a renewed push for the commercialization of health-care wearable devices, and this is evident from the development of wireless temperature-sensing tags and patch monitors to detect the early symptoms of coronavirus. But there are design challenges, particularly around integration. He found that chipmakers are offering sensor ICs and reference boards that ease integration and simplify the optical design in these wearable devices.
There is also big hope for artificial intelligence in health care to improve disease detection in medical diagnostics imaging. “This technology has the potential to refine diagnosis methods and minimize time to treatment by streamlining the image analysis process,” said Dr. Ivan De Backer, technology analyst at IDTechEx.
“Major innovations in this industry revolve around more efficient use of data, increasing the accessibility of this technology and enhancing its value proposition to radiologists,” he said. De Backer takes a look at five key trends in AI technology for medical imaging.
This month’s issue also showcases miniaturized switches and relays designed to fit into space-constrained applications across industries without compromising performance. They also offer ruggedness and long life.
Don’t miss several new components recently introduced into the market for a variety of medical applications. These include a solar harvester and narrow-pitch connectors for wearables.
Cover image: Shutterstock
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