A New Generation of Biomedical Equipment: FPGA

This chapter aims to broaden the bridge that covers the gap between the biomedical science community and engineers, by encouraging the developers and the users of biomedical equipment to apply at a large scale and to promote the Field-Programmable Gate Array technology. One provides a brief recall of this technology and of its key advantages: high electrical performances (great complexity, high speed, low energy consumption, etc.), extremely short time-to-market, high reliability even in field conditions, flexibility, portability, standardization, etc. A tutorial description of the FPGA development methodology is also provided. Some of the most successful FPGA applications in this field are mentioned: medical imaging, minimally-invasive surgery platforms, radio-frequency identification, etc.