Texas Instruments (TI) announced today it is allocating a total of $15 million to global university medical technology research. The funding will support research and development of innovations such as personal medical devices, implantables, medical imaging, wireless health-care systems and biosensors. Kent Novak, vice president of TI's medical business unit, said, "In the 1990s, wireless communications systems, cell phones and PDAs were major areas of R&D and leading market drivers in the electronics industry. Many new and emerging medical systems are now utilizing these established technologies to improve patient monitoring in hospitals, for feature-enhanced personal care devices for rapidly modernizing health-care systems in developing countries where standardized healthcare is virtually nonexistent." TI technology has been used in portable imaging, wireless communications for patient monitoring, retinal prosthesis and DSP (digital signal processor)-based robotics for amputees and in complementary semiconductor technologies such as high-performance analog, digital signal processing, ultralow-power microcontrollers, wireless connectivity and DLP (digital light processing). For more information and proposal submission guidelines, visit: www.ti.com/medical