Blore firm to launch fetal heart monitoring system'

A Bangalore-based medical equipment maker has developed a fetal heart monitoring system powered by Xilinx Inc’s sixth generation field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip – Spartan – which will allow expecting mothers to track the fetal activity in the womb and transmit data to an obstetrician and help save babies’ lives.

The Bangalore firm, which has an NDA (non-disclosure agreement) with Xilinx, is one of the 17 third-party partners that the US-based fabless semiconductor major has in India.

“The idea is to offer a low-cost and automated system that monitors fetal heart tracings and maternal contraction patterns, and raises an alarm in case a pre-term birth is likely to occur. The prototype of the fetal heart monitoring system is in place and trials have already been carried out in a few local hospitals. The Bangalore company is planning to introduce the system in all the public health centres across the country by December 2009,” Amit Dhir, senior director (business operations), Xilinx, told Business Standard.

Xilinx has made India the Asia-Pacific hub to strengthen its global research and development ecosystem by opening an R&D centre in Hyderabad in 2006, which is the company’s largest outside of the US. The Hyderabad centre, which currently houses 130 engineers, has a scalable capacity of up to 300.

“The Hyderabad team, working in tandem with Xilinx’s R&D centres abroad, has contributed to the software, silicon and systems besides providing IPs for signal processing for the fetal monitoring system,” he said, adding that the company’s industrial, scientific and medical applications including industrial networking, motion control, machine vision, surveillance and medical imaging, contributed 30 per cent to its global revenues of $1.8 billion last year.

Stating that Xilinx is bullish on the aerospace and defence market in India with more and more adoptions happening with its chips, Dhir said the company had not seen any news that the capex for this sector is going to go down in the current economic slowdown.

“The Indian government’s budget allocation for the aerospace and defence sectors is $26 billion. We expect this to grow next year, an opportunity which we see especially in the radar signalling, ground-based cryptographic equipment, and wireless and software defined radio space,” he said, adding that the company will be introducing its Virtex-7 family FPGAs and software solutions in programming and designing in India by the end of this financial year.