The rad-hard chip market has suddenly become sexy.
Last month, Xilinx made clear its aim to widen the use of FPGAs in military and aerospace systems by introducing its highest performance rad-hard programmable device to date.
“FPGAs can now replace Asics in the design of software defined radio modems, fast Fourier transforms and beam-forming in geostationary and low earth orbit satellites,” Amit Dhir, senior director for aerospace/defence at Xilinx told EW.
Now we learn that US-based aerospace company Northrop Grumman has developed a radiation-hardened 90nm silicon-on-insulator standard cell Asic intellectual property for military and space applications.
"This next-generation of application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) technology allows a higher level of integration, lower power and faster speeds," said Stuart Linsky, v-p of satellite communications for Northrop Grumman's Aerospace Systems sector.
Northrop Grumman worked with Cadence Design Systems to develop the rad-hard IP library.
"This cell library enables users to design very large radiation hardened Asics in a low-power, high-performance semiconductor process for space applications," said Linsky.
The first test chips were fabbed by Freescale Semiconductor, including a five million-gate Asic.
Radiation hardening by design is a method of making electronic components and systems resistant to damage or malfunctions by ionizing radiation, or particle radiation and high-energy electromagnetic radiation.
One way this is achieved is by duplicating circuits within the device so that if one element fails the chip will continue working.
This will reduce the number of usable gates/cells in either the FPGA or Asic.
Xilinx says it has a technique for rad-hardening which allows all the Virtex-5QV’s 130,000 logic cells and 320 DSP slices to be used.
According to Dhir, these are fully useable gates as there is no redundancy in the logic. It is the configuration control logic and the JTAG controller which have the triple module transistor redundancy needed to achieve rad-hard operation.
Radition immunity is specified as a total ionising dose of greater that 700kRad.
See also: Actel offers rad-tolerant FFT core for RTAX-DSP FPGA