LONDON — Defense and aerospace company BAE Systems Inc. (Rockville, Maryland) and Achronix Semiconductor Corp. (San Jose, Calif.) have agreed to develop a reconfigurable radiation-hardened field-programmable gate array.
The device is, in essence, a port of Achronix' high-performance FPGA technology to BAE Systems' radiation-hardened 150-nm manufacturing process.
The agreement was reached after successful Single Event Effects (SEE) testing of a 150-nm process test chip which utilized the Achronix Redundancy Voting Circuit (RVC). The RVC methodology protects FPGA functionality from single-event transient and single-event upset effects, improving function reliability and reducing the risk of in-space failure, said Achronix.
"Our relationship with BAE Systems demonstrates our commitment to the military and aerospace markets," said Dan Elftmann, director of strategic marketing for industrial, military and aerospace marketing at Achronix Semiconductor, in a statement. "Our proprietary multi-GHz FPGA fabric and BAE Systems' radiation-hardened process technology will result in the industries first SEU and SET hardened reconfigurable FPGA targeting speeds of 350MHz." he added.
Under the agreement Achronix will develop, market, and sell the FPGA and work with BAE Systems for 150 nm fabrication at its foundry in Manassas, Virginia.
"This device will eliminate area-consuming triple redundancy methods and free up designers to focus on their designs," said George Nossaman, director of BAE Systems' Advanced Digital Systems. "BAE Systems is partnering with Achronix in response to critical customer needs for reliable radiation-hardened reconfigurable FPGA devices."
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