Space-borne missions require special components, owing to their high radiation environment. Xilinx is now producing its Virtex®-5QV field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) as radiation-hardened components with total total ionizing dose (TID) capabilities in excess of 1 Mrad. These single-event-upset (SEU) hardened FPGAs offer an off-the-shelf computing solution to space stations and other deep-space projects requiring production-quantity rad-hard devices.

The effects of radiation in space on logic devices are evidenced by single-event phenomena that can disrupt performance, resulting in lost data. In addition to high immunity to SEU phenomena, the Virtex-5QV FPGAs (Fig. 1) feature total immunity to single-event latchup (SEL) and data path protection from single-event transients. The rad-hard features inherent in Virtex-5QV devices are backed by the highest levels of in-beam testing by the Xilinx Radiation Test Consortium (XRTC) and equivalent to millions of device years in space radiation environments. The configuration memory in a rad-hard Virtex-5QV FPGA features nearly 1000 times the SEU hardness of the standard cell latches in the firm’s commercial grade devices, while configuration control logic and the JTAG controller have been hardened with embedded triple module redundancy.

NASA has adopted the Virtex-5QV FPGAs as part of the Materials On International Space Station Experiment (MISSE-8) on the International Space Station (Fig. 2). MISSE is a testing ground for computing elements and materials to determine how they react to the effects of atomic oxygen, ultraviolet, direct sunlight, radiation, and extreme temperatures. “We are excited that NASA’s Earth Science Technology Office, in partnership with the ELaNa-3 CubeSat Launch Program, is sponsoring the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the University of Michigan to be the first to fly a production Virtex-5QV FPGA, as the time-to-launch has been significantly reduced by utilizing an off-the-shelf, reprogrammable, rad-hard device,” says Harvey Steele, Jr., Xilinx Vice President, Segment Marketing and Business Operations. 

The rad-hard Virtex-5QV FPGAs build on the Xilinx’s second-generation ASMBL™ column-based architecture used for the commercial Virtex-5QV FPGAs. Leveraging 450-MHz digital-signal-processing (DSP), they incorporate flexible 36-kb/18-kb block RAM/FIFOs, second generation 25x18 DSP slices, 18 multi-gigabit (greater than 3 GHz) serial transceiver (MGTs) channels, and 840 user input/output (I/O) ports. The FPGAs operate at a core voltage of 1 V and feature more than 131,000 logic cells for flexible processing. They include 131,072 logic cells, 20,480 slices, and 81,920 CLB flip-flops. They feature SEL immunity of greater than 125 MeV-cm2/mg and can handle TID levels in excess of 1 Mrad.

These devices offer tremendous processing power and flexibility with the capability of providing reliable operation even in high-radiation environments. They are pin-compatible with the firm’s Virtex-5 FX130T FPGAs, and are supported by Xilinx’s ML510 commercial prototyping board.

Xilinx, Inc.
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www.xilinx.com