Claimed to be the industry's first high-density, rad-hard reconfigurable FPGA for withstanding radiation environments, Xilinx has released the off-the-shelf Virtex-5QV FPGA. It is designed for applications ranging from low earth-orbiting satellites to systems supporting inter-planetary missions. The FPGAs protect against single event upset, are immune to single event latch-up, have high tolerance to TID (total ionizing dose) and provide data path protection from single event transients. For example, the configuration memory provides nearly 1,000 times the single event latch-up hardness of the standard cell latches in the commercial device. Configuration control logic and the JTAG controller have also been hardened with embedded triple module redundancy. The devices integrate hard-IP system level blocks, such as flexible 36kbit and 18kbit block RAM or FIFOs, second generation 25x18 DSP slices, power-optimised high-speed serial transceiver blocks for enhanced serial connectivity, and PCI Express-compliant integrated Endpoint blocks. The FPGA offers 130,000 logic cells, 320 DSP slices supporting fixed and floating point operations, and 836 user I/Os programmable to more than 30 different standards for applications. It also provides the industry's first integrated high-speed connectivity for space with 18 channels of 3Gbit/s multi-gigabit serial transceivers for chip-to-chip, board-to-board and box-to-box communication.
