Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Atmel is offering its first rad-hard in-system re-programmable 3.3V FPGA, with built-in Single Event Upset (SEU) protection. Upgraded from the AT40K40AL, an SRAM-based FPGA, the AT40KEL040 has been re-designed to meet the stringent radiation requirements of space applications.
Developed for low gate count rad-hard designs, the AT40KEL040 offers up to 50k usable Asic gates and 18kbit user-configurable SRAM blocks. It is offered as an alternative to mask configured Asics offering a development flow with no Non Recurrent Engineering (NRE cost and no minimum order quantity.
Produced on a radiation hardened 0.35µm CMOS process, the AT40KEL040 combines rad-hard capabilities – a latch-up threshold higher than 70MeV.cm2/mg and a total dose in excess of 200krad – with a 60MHz system speed over the full military temperature range.
The device’s configuration memory has been designed to have a low sensitivity to SEU, resulting in an upset rate lower than 3E-6 error per device per day in the worst orbit conditions.
To configure the AT40KEL040, a 1Mbit maximum bit stream is needed. For this function, Atmel offers to use its AT17LV010-10DP, a 1Mbit serial 3.3V EEPROM, hermetically packaged and qualified to the standard space quality screening flows.
The chip is currently available in either 130 or 240 PCI compliant I/Os, housed in MQFPF160 and MQFPF 256 packages, respectively.
www.atmel.com
