DDC has a wide breadth of medical equipment experience. DDC tends to be on the high end in terms of complexity and algorithmic sophistication, and we ultimately culminate our experience in the most advanced applications and highest levels of integration, using the latest FPGA technologies. Our medical applications expertise loosely falls into 4 general categories, as outlined below.

DDC has researched, architected, then developed, implemented, and tested the actual hardware and software, for medical imaging applications, for such companies as GE, Toshiba, Siemens, and Loral. Specifically, DDC has worked with angiography lineups, CT scanners, PET scanners, coincidence detecters, all in the image processing sections of these products. DDC has developed very high speed portions of image reconstruction and back projection systems, including such functions as very high speed frequency domain filtering (FFT, IFFT, etc.), lossless compression, distortion correction, various weighting and extrapolation functions, warp, zoom, image reconstructions, etc. In most of these systems, DDC has developed the hardware and also developed the driver and application software, both in image reconstruction, image processing, and in control. DDC has also developed and implemented a sophisticated imaging system for DNA slide analysis, including all of the camera control. We have also co-developed a high speed finger-print recognition system.

DDC has developed several FPGAs and software for medical control applications for angiography lineups, fitness machines (heart rate monitor), ECG equipment (16 analog channel control, with remote video switching, optical data transfer, etc.), EEG equipment, audiometric brainwave analyzers, eye motion equipment, camera controllers, etc. DDC has extensive experience in developing GUIs to control such equipment as well, both for test and product uses. As an example, DDC has developed a 2 board product (with FPGAs and software) for Toshiba which interfaced and controlled: a CT data acquisition board (DAS) to accept the actual scan information, motor control board for control of the gantry including rotation, the X-Ray source for configuration of X-ray power level (eV) and implementing safety controls, the slip ring to send the high speed formatted scan data to the non-rotating side (stator) using up to four 2 Gbps links, the housing FAN for thermal management, etc.

DDC has extensive experience in developing audio stimulus and retinal stimulus for EEG correlation of external stimulus. This involved developing FPGAs and software to provide AM and FM modulated tones with very high precision and sampling rates on 12 different channels, providing lightbar stimulus, and writing the Windows XP WDM drivers which controlled the system. We also developed for GE a board and FPGAs for a hear-rate monitor which included the optical data flow from the apparatus, and subsequent control.

DDC has much experience in video and imaging electronics, as outlined below. There are many more. The following is a high level summary of the some of the product categories DDC has expertise in.

Set-top boxes: DDC has developed several different compression chips including an MPEG set-top box lineup. This was an SoC which performed full MPEG I and II audio and video digital decompression and image reconstruction for digital TV applications. So, DDC has significant experience in compression, NTSC, PAL, CCIR656, CCIR601, RS-170, etc. DDC has created several tools for working with these types of systems, and performed these various tasks for Cadence, Motorola, Sarnoff, and ST Microelectromnics.

Digital camera chips. DDC has developed several digital camera chips for companies such as Nikon, Kodak, and Motorola. They are typically high resolution SoC devices with many image processing algorithms, such as compression, color processing, zoom, etc. and with many peripherals (SmartMedia, CompactFlash, etc.)

Videophone: DDC has developed significant portions of the image processing line-up in the Motorola video cellular phone. DDC has also written much of the image processing software which interacted with the image processing functions, and was also responsible for the image quality (with performing things such as white balance, contrasting, etc.). DDC has worked extensively with video conferencing equipment as well.

Military: DDC has researched, architected, then developed, implemented, and tested the actual hardware, for all video/image processing elements between several different CCD and FLIRs, to the display (both analog and digital) at frame rates of 60fps and resolutions up to 1280. This was accomplished with FPGAs DDC created from scratch, using some of it’s own intellectual property, and developing the rest. The FPGAs which DDC designed included: analog video decoder (RS-170) and digital inputs, frame/field conversions, non-uniformity correction, bad pixel replacement, thresholding, histogramming, contrast enhancement/expansion, translation, rotation, zoom, picture-in-picture, sharpening, temporal filtering/averaging, median filtering, convolution, symbology overlay, analog video endcoders (RS-170) and digital outputs, and all of the associated control, such as genlock, bandwidth management, SDRAM interfaces, processor interfaces, etc. Literally, DDC has done everything required to do this type of video and image processing