Design Techniques for Radiation-Hardened FPGAs

With the RH1280 and RH1020, Actel Corporation introduces radiation-hardened versions of the popular A1280 and A1020 field programmable gate array (FPGA) familes with equivalent gate densities of 8,000 and 2,000 gate array gates, respectively. These products are processed to the QML process flow as defined in MIL-PRF-38535. They are manufactured with a 0.8 micron, two-level metal epitaxial bulk CMOS technology, and offer total dose radiation-hardness in excess of 300K rads (Si) with guaranteed latch-up immunity. Because of this high total dose capability, the RH1280 and RH1020 are intended for use in applications including Earth orbiting satellites, deep space probes, and military electronics. The RH1280 contains a total of 1232 logic modules. There are two types of logic modules: a combinatorial (C-module) and a sequential module (S-module). The S-module can implement the same combinatorial logic as the C-module, and it also contains a flip-flop that can be configured in several different ways. Logic diagrams for the C-module and S-module are shown in Figure 1. The RH1280 contains 608 C-modules and 624 S-modules.