Xilinx is hoping to take a larger share of the space market with radiation-hard FPGAs that it believes will find applications where previously only asics have been used.

While the company has previously had radiation-tolerant parts, these radiation-hard parts can handle greater levels of exposure and can reduce the need for designers to triplicate circuits in space bound missions.

The previous parts – Virtex II and Virtex V4 – had radiation tolerance levels of 200 and 300krad, respectively. The radiation-hard Virtex 5QV parts can handle 700krad.

“With the radiation-tolerant parts, we didn’t change the design or process but changed the package to bring up the radiation tolerance levels,” said Amit Dhir, senior director of Xilinx’s aerospace, defence and high-performance computing business. “With the radiation-hard parts, we have gone in and hardened the circuitry by designing around certain parts of the silicon.”

With radiation tolerant parts in high earth orbits or on inter-planetary craft, circuitry had to be duplicated or triplicated to allow for failures.

“Now with these radiation levels, our customers don’t need to triplicate the logic or devices,” said Dhir. “They may still decide they want to triplicate it; it is their architecture, they can choose to do that if they want. But size, weight and power is a big deal in space and they want to reduce these as much as possible. So, if you can give them these immunity levels, they don’t need to triplicate.”

The Virtex-5QV device has 130,000 logic cells, 320 DSP slices supporting fixed and floating point operations, and 836 user IOs programmable to more than 30 different standards. There are 18 channels of 3Gbit/s multi-gigabit serial transceivers for chip-to-chip, board-to-board and box-to-box communications.

“The radiation hardened Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGA represents the biggest step ever taken in performance and affordability for space electronics,” said David Hardy, associate director for space technology at Air Force Research Laboratory’s Space Vehicles Directorate, Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. “Our Air Force satellite developers will be able to do more on-board processing using less power than ever before. And, the flexibility of the Virtex-5QV FPGA means that satellite development schedules will be shortened, saving even more money.”

Xilinx is guaranteeing that the parts will be available for up to 15 years. Design work by customers started one to two years ago and the aim is to have them ready for production early next year.