Radiation-tolerant RTAX-DSP FPGAs by Actel are now qualified in accordance with the military and aerospace industry standard Mil-Std-883 Class B specification. The FPGAs add tolerance to radiation-induced ASICs and SRAM-based FPGAs for signal processing applications in space, with immunity to radiation effects in space, and no non-recurring engineering charges, claims the company. The FPGAs offer up to 15billion multiply-accumulates/s at densities of up to 4million equivalent system gates and 840 user I/Os for space-based applications. They include embedded radiation-tolerant multiply-accumulate blocks (mathblocks) to the company's RTAX-S architecture. This, according to the company, increases device performance when implementing arithmetic functions, such as those encountered in DSP algorithms. The 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 for signal processing without compromising reliability or radiation tolerance, says the company, and without requiring users to cope with complex system-level radiation mitigation challenges. The FPGAs are available in two sizes: RTAX4000D and RTAX2000D and in 352pin CQFP and 1272pin CCGA packages.
