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Silicon that goes pitter pat
18 | MAY/JUNE 2012 | MICROmanufacturing
Siemens
Doctors used an empty shoe polish tin to encase the first implantable pacemaker in epoxy resin. The
device (similar to the one pictured above) only lasted a few hours before it had to be replaced.
Though implantable pacemakers now
come in models as small as a half dollar,
rampant talk on the Internet promises a
future with devices that offer an exponential
reduction in size and cost—not to mention
reduced risk of infection.
To be sure, today’s pacemaker options
are dwarfed by the first such device ever
implanted. That Siemens-Elema pacemaker,
implanted in 1958, was the size of a shoe
polish tin.
The analogy isn’t as random as you
might think. Swedish developers Dr. Rune
Elmqvist, a physician working as an engineer
for Siemens-Elema, and Dr. Åke Senning, a
cardiologist and professor at the Korolinska
Hospital in Stockholm, took advantage of
emerging silicon technology to develop a
pacemaker small enough to be implanted.
Once assembled, they used an empty shoe
polish tin to encase all the components of the
pacemaker within epoxy resin.
During “a secret emergency operation on
Oct. 8, 1958,” the device was implanted into
43-year-old Arne Larsson, who was suffering
from a life-threatening cardiac arrhythmia,
according to a Web-based historical account
from Siemens AG, Munich.
As crude as such ingenuity may seem
today, there’s no need to feel sorry for
Larsson; he went on to enjoy an active
lifestyle, outliving even the men who saved
his life—Elmqvist and Senning. Larsson is
said to have had 26 pacemakers implanted
before his death in 2001 at age 86.
While Larsson’s first pacemaker used
just two transistors, pacemakers today
incorporate microprocessors with billions of
transistors. In fact, the programmable devices
are capable of wireless communications that
enable physicians to remotely monitor the
pacemakers and their patients.
For example, the Ingenio family of
pacemakers, launched in the European