Xilinx is aiming 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.
The 450MHz Virtex-5QV has 130,000 logic cells, 320 DSP slices supporting fixed and floating point operations.
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.
Built on the ASMBL column-based architecture, this is a full spec Virtex-5 device with similar tools in the ISE Design Suite and hard-IP system level blocks, such as 36kbit/18kbit block RAM/FIFOs, second generation 25x18 DSP slices and PCI Express compliant integrated Endpoint blocks.
There are also 836 user-programmable I/Os available.
The device is sampling with general production availability planned for first half of next year.