We’ve all spent time, maybe too much time, in clinic waiting rooms or in hospital wards watching monitors and checking the beeps of machines showing healthcare technology in action.
With every visit, you’ll notice a leap in the deployment of this technology. It’s because the healthcare industry is seeing a tech boom, particularly when it comes to leveraging cloud computing to develop on-demand, self-service online infrastructures for more effective patient care.
It’s not so much a new technology as it’s a new model for delivering computing resources.
Cloud computing got an unexpected boost from protocols deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic. To minimize contact, the healthcare industry designed more products that use remote services in place of local servers or networks to store, manage, and process data.
Cloud computing allows healthcare providers to easily share real-time data along unlimited distances, eliminating delays in patient treatment. This emerging technology also adds capabilities such as mobility, collaboration with patients and peers, easy archiving of electronic records, streamlined collaboration, the ability to access and deploy high-powered analytics, telemedicine capabilities, and more.
In this week’s New Tech Tuesdays, we’ll look at new products from Micron, Xilinx, and Amphenol built for cloud computing solutions.
You’ll want speed and performance with a solid-state drive, especially when it comes to getting high performance with minimal power for all-day use on ultrathin notebooks or professional workstations. The Micron 3400 Solid State Drive (SSD) with NVMe™ is an industry first 176-layer mass-production NAND dense storage solution. The Micron 3400 SSD has twice the read throughput and up to 85 percent higher write throughput than prior generation SSDs with NVMe, which allows applications such as real-time 3D rendering, computer-aided design, and animation.
If your design needs true network convergence, then look no further than the Xilinx® Alveo™ SN1000 SmartNIC Accelerator Card. The SN1000 SmartNIC combines network connectivity, computer, and storage acceleration into a single solution. Offered in a single slot, half-length, full-height form factor, the card enables maximum CPU savings of cloud services by offloading infrastructure workloads to the SmartNIC allowing deployment of bare-metal services. The SN1000 integrates an XCU26 FPGA and an NXP Semiconductors Layerscape Processor that features 16 Arm® v8 Cortex®-A72 cores. The SN1000 has two QSFP28 network connections and an x16 PCI Express® Gen 3/Gen 4 x8 interface connected to the XCU26.
Amphenol FCI Millipacs® High Speed Right Angle Receptacles are 2.0mm modular, board-to-board, and cable-to-board interconnection systems. The hard-metric (HM) series are used extensively for applications that require data rates of up to 3Gbps. Also offered are high-speed (HS) right angel receptacles well-suited for medical, data, industrial, instrumentation, and communication applications. For medical use, they’re ideal for magnetic resonance imaging scanners and diagnostic equipment where the right angle receptacles retain mating compatibility with existing backplane architecture, making it a cost-effective upgrade. They are also compatible with HM backplane headers and offer lower cross talk at higher frequency performance. The receptacles are also available in a five-row version with horizontal pinning assignments that provides up to 24 differential pairs (DP) for Type A or 30 DP for Type AB per 50mm of standard module length.
COVID-19 prompted a need for immediate change in the medical industry. Meeting social distance requirements while still delivering quality patient care proved a real challenge. Cloud computing provided the answer. In this week's device selection, we focused on the design needs of cloud applications, such as speed, power, and connectivity. Cloud computing allows healthcare providers to share real-time data and eliminate delays in patient care. Besides adding mobility and enhancing collaboration with patients and peers, cloud computing ensures easy archiving of electronic records, high-powered analytics, and telemedicine capabilities.
Tommy Cummings is a freelance writer/editor based in Texas. He's had a journalism career that has spanned more than 40 years. He contributes to Texas Monthly and Oklahoma Today magazines. He's also worked at The Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, San Francisco Chronicle, and others. Tommy covered the dot-com boom in Silicon Valley and has been a digital content and audience engagement editor at news outlets. Tommy worked at Mouser Electronics from 2018 to 2021 as a technical content and product content specialist.