With its eye on the growing market for consumer medical devices, Texas Instruments is offering a development kit based on its OMAP processor platform which is designed to speed up the introduction of new types of medical instruments.

The Zoom Medical OMAP35x development kit and associated modules is intended to provide medical product developers with an advanced graphical user interface, smart and real-time physiological processing, and wired and wireless connectivity options for patient monitoring and data logging applications.
 
The processing elements include an ARM Cortex-A8 core, TMS320C64x+ digital signal processor, 2D/3D graphics engine and video accelerators.

These are the first processors based on the ARM Cortex-A8 core, and they are notable because they offer the performance to widen the market for its OMAP mobile phone platform to other types of handheld product, including medical monitors.

The superscalar 600MHz Cortex-A8 core has been integrated into four OMAP35x applications processors which have been tuned to meet the needs of designs in automotive, consumer, embedded and medical where graphics and Internet capabilities are becoming important. 

For the first time the software for the company’s DaVinci multimedia platform will be able to run high end video on the OMAP35x devices, including the OMAP3525 and OMAP3530.

Operating system support includes Linux, Windows CE and Green Hills operating systems.

The Zoom Medical OMAP35x development kit (TMDXMEVM3503-L) will be generally available later in the year for $995.