Isolation - Digital or Optical?

Hi,

May I know which type of isolation technology is more suitable for medical device design? As I m designing a medical device, the isolation is required to protect the patients from being electric shocked. So I m wondering which type of isolation to implement.

Will the digital isolator creates EMC problem due to the high freq switching inside the chip? Does anyone hv some examples on how to design a isolation circuit between a MCU n external circuit?

Thanks a lot!

Sincerely,
Eric Mar

Here is the complete description (includig schematics) of EEG Biofeedback Brainwave Analyzer:
**broken link removed**
The optical isolation is implemented between microcontroller and the serial port through which the micro communicates with a PC ..
Also, have a look at this site:
http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/links-biopsy.html#schematics-gsr
(a lot of lnks are dead, but still there are planty of examples on electronics in medicine) and I think you will find it quite resourceful..
Regards,
IanP

IanP said:

Here is the complete description (includig schematics) of EEG Biofeedback Brainwave Analyzer:
**broken link removed**

Click to expand...

The PDF is not available online any longer. If anyone have a PDF, could you please uplioad it?

**broken link removed**
The optical isolation is implemented between microcontroller and the serial port through which the micro communicates with a PC ..

venky442 said:

http://www.cc-concepts.com/products/hal4/hal4.pdf
The optical isolation is implemented between microcontroller and the serial port through which the micro communicates with a PC ..

Click to expand...

The PDF is not available online any longer (error 404, unfortunately). If anyone have this PDF, could you please uplioad it?

Hello,

What do you exactly mean by digital isolators?

Optical isolators (e.g. optocouplers) are the best way to isolation purposes for medical applications. For example, if you are considering IEC-601, wide body optocouplers (e.g. HCNW2611 from Avago) can be a very good choice.



Kind regards
Hakeen

hakeen said:

Hello,

What do you exactly mean by digital isolators?

Optical isolators (e.g. optocouplers) are the best way to isolation purposes for medical applications. For example, if you are considering IEC-601, wide body optocouplers (e.g. HCNW2611 from Avago) can be a very good choice.



Kind regards
Hakeen

Click to expand...

Digital isolators are those which only provide output of either 0 or 1 just like normal digital signals unlike the analog isolator which has different voltage range of output with respect to different range of input signal.