Actel Corp.'s its radiation-tolerant RTAX-DSP FPGAs have completed qualification in accordance with the military and aerospace industry standard MIL-STD-883 Class B specification. This qualification expands Actel's support of high-speed signal processing applications for space payloads and exemplifies its ongoing innovation and commitment to serve designers of spaceflight systems. RTAX-DSP FPGAs offer designers the same reliability characteristics as the widely-adopted RTAX-S FPGAs, and also include enhancements to improve tolerance to radiation-induced single-event transients. When compared to radiation-hardened ASICs and SRAM-based FPGAs, RTAX-DSP FPGAs give designers a compelling alternative for signal processing applications in space, with flight-proven and trusted programming technology immune to radiation effects in space, and no non-recurring engineering charges.
RTAX-DSP FPGAs offer up to 15 billion multiply-accumulates per second at densities of up to 4 million equivalent system gates and 840 user I/Os for space-based applications, and include embedded radiation-tolerant multiply-accumulate blocks (mathblocks) to the tried-and-trusted industry-standard RTAX-S architecture. The result is a dramatic increase in device performance and utilization when implementing arithmetic functions, such as those encountered in DSP algorithms.
"Unique to RTAX-DSP FPGAs, new radiation single-event effect hardening techniques have been implemented in the DSP Mathblocks and in the logic fabric. Radiation testing has demonstrated the effectiveness of these techniques in mitigating radiation single event transients with little area overhead and time penalty," said Ken O'Neill, director of high-reliability marketing for Actel. "This feature gives RTAX-DSP FPGAs an unprecedented advantage in achieving high levels of signal-processing throughput without compromising reliability or radiation tolerance, and without requiring users to cope with complex system-level radiation mitigation challenges."
Actel
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