Radiation-tolerant FPGA is alternative to ASIC: News from Actel Europe

Note: A free brochure or catalogue is available from Actel Europe on the products in this news release. Click here to request a copy.

In response to the overwhelming interest in its high-performance, radiation-tolerant RTAX-S family, Actel has introduced the 250,000-gate RTAX250S field-programmable gate array (FPGA), extending the family to three devices ranging in density from 250,000 to 2-million equivalent system gates. The addition of the new lower density RTAX250S FPGA further enables Actel to provide access to all of the advantages of the RTAX-S solutions, including onboard memory, practical single-event upset (SEU) immunity, and an expanded set of I/O standards, to those space designers with moderate logic requirements. Combined with proven reliability at extreme temperatures and live at power-up functionality on a single chip, the product's advantages will enable the RTAX250S device, a radiation-tolerant alternative to ASICs, to meet the density, performance and radiation-resistance requirements of many satellite bus and payload applications, such as command and data handling, attitude and orbit control, and management of spacecraft power and environmental controls.

The RTAX-S devices offer inherent single-event latch-up (SEL) immunity; immunity to SEUs with a LET threshold far greater than 37MeV-cm2/mg; and total ionising dose (TID) performance in the region of 300krad.

The family also features embedded RAM with an upset rate of better than 1e-10 errors/bit-day with error detection and correction (EDAC).

With 250,000 system gates, or 30,000 ASIC-equivalent gates, the RTAX250S contains support for up to 54Kbit of embedded SRAM, 248 user I/Os, and 1408 SEU-hardened registers.

To enable board-level functional verification and simulation of production-qualified solutions, Actel offers RTAX250S prototyping capability via pin-compatible, commercial Axcelerator FPGAs.

Actel's RTAX-S prototyping solution includes software support for EDAC intellectual property, which mitigates SEUs in the user memory.

Application notes explaining how to design RTAX-S based applications using Axcelerator devices are available from the Actel at website.

The RTAX-S family is supported by the Actel Libero integrated design environment and Actel Designer tool suite, which includes place and route, timing analysis and memory generation functionality.

Additional support for the family is provided by industry-leading third-party tools from Model Technology, Mentor Graphics, Synplicity, Cadence Design Systems and Synopsys.

Prototyping capability for the RTAX250S is currently available, with production scheduled to begin in the second half of 2004.

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Radiation-tolerant FPGA is alternative to ASIC

The 250,000-gate RTAX250S field-programmable gate array extends the RTAX-S family to three devices, ranging in density from 250,000 to 2-million equivalent system gates.