Avnet Manufacturing Services Helps In The Fight Of COVID-19

With the outbreak of the Covid-19 epidemic on a global scale, the demand for medical ventilators has increased sharply and overloaded the suppliers that specialize in the production of ventilators are overloaded.  

Avnet group as a whole is doing its part for our community and our customers to combat coronavirus (COVID-19) through technology. Embest, Avnet Manufacturing Service, also has fulfilled several customer’s urgent demand for ventilator solution.

What is a ventilator? It saves lives.

The ventilator is an artificial mechanical ventilation device used to assist or control the patient's spontaneous breathing movement. It facilitates the oxygen exchange in the lungs to avoid ARDS (acute respiratory distress syndrome) and helps the recovery of respiratory function.

Measuring only 65.46mm by 102.04mm, MarSBoard is a low-cost highly-integrated controller board based on NXP’s i.MX 6Dual ARM Cortex-A9 application processor which encompasses a dual-core platform running up to 1 GHz with 1 MB of L2 cache and 64-bit DDR3 or 2-ch., 32-bit LPDDR2 support. Integrated FlexCAN, MLB busses, PCI Express® and SATA-2 provide excellent connectivity, while integration of LVDS, MIPI display port, MIPI camera port and HDMI v1.4, the i.MX 6Dual provides a scalable solution for consumer, automotive and industrial applications.

How it works:

The PWM output command controls the oxygen supply and alarm module of the ventilator. Data and information is collected from various sensors and transferred through onboard UART, SPI and IIC signal interfaces to Mainboard for calculation. All analysis and data will be transferred through GPIO and results/data are shown on the external display connected via LVDS interface.

【CASESTUDY】Breathing monitoring and alarming system (customized based on MarSBoard)

1 Mainboard, 1 display module, 1 alarm module and 1 sensor.

The display module is placed beside the hospital bed, and the sensor module is placed in the hose of the ventilator for the treatment of patients with new coronavirus pneumonia. The sensor module mainly monitors two items of data: the air pressure and air flow that the patient breathes through the ventilator hose, and transmits the air pressure and air flow data to the alarm module. The alarm module mainly calculates the following three key values:

• Average airflow value (L/m)

• Maximum airflow value in the last minute (L/m)

• Air volume for one breath (cc)

Mainboard System Block Diagram