Actel announces 4-Mgate rad-hard FPGA

As part of their overall strategy to help designers maximize reliability, minimize power consumption, and save board space and weight in mission-critical space systems, the folks at Actel have announced that they have completed the stringent MIL-STD 883 Class B qualification of their four-million gate radiation-tolerant RTAX-S field-programmable gate array (FPGA).

The high-density RTAX4000S device has completed 1,000 hours of high-temperature operating life (HTOL) testing and nearly 80,000 total hours of life testing data to date. This device-specific testing data is in addition to the more than 2,000,000 device hours of testing and rapidly accumulating flight heritage achieved by the remainder of the RTAX-S family.

The qualification of the device, combined with its usable error-corrected on-board memory and large number of user I/O, make it ideal for high-bandwidth processing applications in spacecraft payloads. Rigorous testing and qualification of the RTAX4000S toward QML Class Q and QML Class V certification continues.

Hardened by design against radiation single-event upsets (SEUs), the nonvolatile RTAX4000S requires no radiation mitigation techniques. Actel claims that competing high-density FPGA solutions require user-instantiated triple module redundancy (TMR), which can consume more than two-thirds of the device's available logic. They say that the RTAX4000S offers the inherent flexibility of the programmable fabric, delivering cost and time-to-market advantages over radiation-hardened (RH)-ASICs with their long lead times and high up-front tooling charges that – in combination with minimal volume requirements for many space applications – often translate to higher total solution costs.

Availability
The RTAX4000S device, the largest member of the successful RTAX-S family, is available now. For further information about pricing and availability, please contact Actel.