Software Configurable FPGA for Human Blood Cell Count Analyzer

The Customer
A $20 billion global health care company, serving customers in more than 130 countries, developing, manufacturing and marketing products and services that span from prevention and diagnosis to treatment and cure, with more than 120 manufacturing, distribution, R&D and other locations around the world.

 

The Challenge
Develop a design on a very small gate count FPGA to control 24 DAC channels, collect data from 9 independent DAC channels and provide control and data access for several ADC channels. The FPGA needed to implement several variations of multiple control interfaces such as:

SPI
DAC MUX
Gain DAC
ADC
Test control
Interrupts
DMA Control

 

The Solution
Comit developed a very small footprint software-configurable FPGA design to allow extremely flexible implementation through

Configurable DMA start addresses
Configurable channels
Configurable triggers
Configurable trigger time limits
Analog or digital decimation with configurable discard ratios

The final product is used worldwide to determine blood cell counts in human blood samples at a rate greater than 1000 samples per hour.

 

  
   FPGA: Altera
   EPF10K50BC356-3
   Utilization: > 80%
   Software configurable
   design

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