Had a good interview today, with a small group of mostly EEs who do device subcontracting, debug, and design, largely (but not entirely) for medical devices. Having worked for a defib company, one gets a big "in" for having experienced the medical device thang.

Unlike a previous 8.5 hour interview (this was only 2.5 hours) I didn't pick up that they were looking for something else ---in that case, it was more "systems" which I think I can design, albeit I'm middleware averse, but I hadn't the experience. I did design & build a distributed heartbeat/watchdog system in Java, for yucks, because I had been thinking about how you build a reliable medical sensor net.

Also interviewed with a ventilator company.

A quick scoop: Ventilators are big because folks are aging, and there are diseases like SARS that will eat up ventilators.

All the med device companies ride Moore's Law: shrinking, faster, cheaper, lower power, more reliable devices. In the defib case, power semiconductors (2000V, 100A) matters too. Also I found out that a pulse oximetry company uses 7 LEDs, so they are riding the LED wave as well. (Old school is just an IR and visible red emitter.) No doubt solid state pressure transducers matter to the ventilator people.

In today's interview, they're staffing up to handle an electric turkey knife.
Forget light sabers, this can split a pig in half. Sweet. If hired I'll push for a Java UI and get an embedded person for the knife control / protocol. The
actual tech-push there is laparoscopic surgery, doing nasty things through small cuts in the skin.