Re: Ada in medical devices

[Patrick <patrick@spellingbeewinnars.org>]

Hi Jerry

I work with scientific instruments. Most of my customers are university researchers but some are hospitals. Many instruments can double duty between chemical and biological testing.

I don't know too much but I can say a few things..

Jeol makes NMR units, Nuclear Magnetic Spectrometers. They are featured in one of Adacores videos and can be found on youtube. These instruments are Ada based.

Beckman-Coulter is or was using Ada.

Teledyne ISCO is using RTEMS. It could be with just C but I'm guessing it might be with Ada.

Many of the instruments I have worked with are based on MC68K or similar CPUs and I have seen very few microcontroller based instruments, usually the RAM/ROM is external.

I haven't spent much time trying to disassemble other peoples firmware but there is a very expensive interface card(>$10K) that I carry out repairs on. I've poked around in the firmware looking for clues as I have to repair them without schematics and need all the help I can get.

There are clues that some sort of IDE is being used like CodeWarrior and that would make me suspect firmware written in C. Some of the firmware I have looked at had comments intact at the end of the binary and in fact this is the only usefully information I have been able to recover.

I have spent quite a bit of time using various desktop software to control scientific instruments and I seriously doubt that it is written in Ada, most of it is buggy crap.

After nearly 14 years of repairing other peoples stuff I am considering building my own instruments and this is the prime reason why I am interested in Ada right now.

I would love to hear back about any information about Ada being used with scientific instrumentation.

Thanks-Patrick