Modernizing an end-of-life infusion platform

Most of the engineers who had developed the original platform were no longer available. Documentation covered only part of the system, so important design decisions, hardware assumptions, and timing dependencies had to be recovered from the source code and from the behavior of the existing device.

The internal team did not have enough senior engineers who could work across both generations of the platform. The project required people able to read Borland C and x86 assembly, understand the legacy SMX implementation, and trace low-level interactions well enough to reproduce them on ARM. Those skills were scarce, and assigning the available engineers to the migration would have pulled them away from current product work.

The company was also preparing the business for acquisition. An active product tied to obsolete technology, incomplete documentation, and knowledge held by former employees represented a clear technical risk during due diligence. The platform needed to become maintainable and transferable without interrupting support for the installed base.

• Ported the infusion pump control application from a legacy Intel x86 platform to an ARM Cortex architecture running a newer version of SMX RTOS.
• Migrated the embedded software from the legacy Borland C toolchain to GCC and established a new build environment while maintaining backward compatibility of the application source tree.
• Reworked RTOS-dependent software components and adapted the application to the updated SMX API without changing application behavior.
• Converted processor-specific x86 assembly modules to ARM assembly and replaced legacy assembly routines with portable C implementations where appropriate.
• Updated hardware-dependent software to support the new processor architecture, including interrupt handling, ADC/DAC interfaces, logic level adaptation, clock synchronization, and communication with external modules.
• Synchronized execution and communication flows to compensate for the significantly faster ARM processor and preserve interaction with the existing electronics.
• Designed a hardware prototype that replaced the original processor with an ARM evaluation board while retaining the existing logic board and critical hardware components.
• Designed and modified prototype PCBs to integrate the new processor platform with the existing hardware architecture and support full-scale functional testing.
• Developed additional hardware modules required for prototype validation and hardware integration.
• Executed manual, automated, hardware, and regression test suites, including new test cases required by the redesigned hardware and software architecture.
• Ported and adapted the customer’s internal test utilities to the new platform to support validation on the prototype hardware.
• Performed formal verification of the ported application using customer-provided test specifications, verification strategies, acceptance criteria, and test reports.
• Researched, specified, tested, and documented more than 200 alarm behaviors to support compliance with IEC 60601-1-8 as part of the broader infusion platform modernization program.