Design of a system-on-chip for ECG signal processing

The electrocardiogram (ECG) is the body-surface manifestation of the electrical potentials generated during heart activity. The ECG can be used to diagnose heart disease, identify cardiac arrhythmias, and evaluate the effects of drugs. This work presents the design of an ECG-processing System-on-Chip (SoC), which incorporates an ARM922T hard macrocell as its processor core. This SoC takes the ECG signals as inputs, and detects the positions of the QRS-complexes. The architecture of this SoC and the associated algorithm of QRS detection will be discussed in the paper.