FPGA vendor Actel has found and exploited an expansive niche in the programmable logic market: space. By making its flash-based RTAX-S FPGA family inherently rad-hard, the IC manufacturer is finding its products installed on flying thingies galore. Since “enough” is never enough, the company just upped the ante by making available MIL-STD-883 Class B versions of the 4,000,000 gate RTAX4000S. Why not Class S, you ask? The device is inherently rad-hard, and has error-corrected onboard memory, obviating the need for the Triple-Module Redundancy (TMR) usually mandated by other FPGA architectures. This can free up to two-thirds of the device’s logic cells for – ahem! – logic.
The RTAX4000S has completed 1,000 hours of High-Temp Operating Life (HTOL) testing and nearly 80,000 total life test hours to date. These impressive numbers are added onto the “qual by similarity” assigned to the more than 2,000,000 device testing hours attributed to the balance of the RTAX-S family. The company continues to beat the heck out of the devices on their way up to full QML Class Q and Class V certifications. It’s no wonder Actel’s devices are taking up more space (the inky black stuff, that is).
