RT ProASIC®3 FPGAs are the first to offer designers of space-flight hardware a radiation-tolerant (RT), reprogrammable, nonvolatile logic integration vehicle. They are intended for low-power space applications requiring up to 350 MHz operation and up to 3 million system gates.
Unlike all of Actel's other radiation-tolerant, space-flight FPGAs, which use antifuse programming technology, devices in the RT ProASIC3 family use flash cells to store configuration information. Positive or negative charge stored on floating-gate transistors is used to hold pass transistors in either the "on" or "off" states, thereby opening or closing connections between routing tracks and logic resources. This use of flash-based interconnects present some unique opportunities and advantages to designers of space-flight electronic hardware:
- The flash cells are reprogrammable. This allows the designer to change the design of the FPGA without removing the FPGA from the board, making prototyping easier. It also allows for the possibility of in-flight reprogrammability, so that mission life can be extended by re-purposing the hardware to incorporate updated algorithms.
- The flash cells are nonvolatile. This means that flash-based FPGAs are standalone devices which do not require the provision of external code-storage devices, unlike SRAM-based FPGAs. This minimizes the board space used, and has an associated saving in mass.
- RT ProASIC3 FPGAs are operating almost at the instant of power-up, which is another advantage of the nonvolatility of the flash programming cells. There is no boot sequence required, as in SRAM-based FPGAs which need to download their configuration code from an external storage device.
- The flash cells do not exhibit single-event upsets in the presence of heavy ion radiation. Therefore no triple-chip redundancy to mitigate configuration upsets is required, unlike SRAM FPGAs.
Actel's RT ProASIC3 FPGAs are available in two densities, giving designers the opportunity to integrate large or medium-size designs into these single-chip, live-at-power-up devices.
Download: Download ProASIC3 Brochure
