Microsemi Announces RTG4 Radiation-tolerant FPGAs For High-speed Signal Processing Applications

By Editorial Team On May 25, 2015

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., — Microsemi Corporation (Nasdaq: MSCC), a leading provider of semiconductor solutions differentiated by power, security, reliability and performance, today announced availability of its RTG4™ high-speed signal processing radiation-tolerant FPGA family. The RTG4’s reprogrammable flash technology offers complete immunity to radiation-induced configuration upsets in the harshest radiation environments, requiring no configuration scrubbing, unlike SRAM FPGA technology. RTG4 supports space applications requiring up to 150,000 logic elements and up to 300 MHz of system performance.

Typical uses for RTG4 include remote sensing space payloads, such as radar, imaging and spectrometry in civilian, scientific and commercial applications. These applications span across weather forecasting and climate research, land use, astronomy and astrophysics, planetary exploration, and earth sciences. Other applications include mobile satellite services (MSS) communication satellites, as well as high altitude aviation, medical electronics and civilian nuclear power plant control. Such applications have historically used expensive radiation-hardened ASICs, which force development programs to incur substantial cost and schedule risk. RTG4 allows programs to access the ease-of-use and flexibility of FPGAs without sacrificing reliability or performance.

“We expect that the next 10 years will see an increase of about 25 percent in the number of new spacecraft of 50Kg mass or larger,” said Marco Caceres, senior analyst and director of space studies for the Virginia-based Teal Group consulting firm. “These new spacecraft will have more sophisticated payload electronics than their predecessors, doing more on-board data processing to maximize data acquisition while dealing with limited downlink bandwidth.”

The flexibility, reliability and performance of RTG4 FPGAs make it much easier to achieve this. RTG4 is Microsemi’s latest development in a long history of radiation-tolerant FPGAs that are found in many NASA and international space programs.

“Space Micro is pleased to be working with Microsemi’s RTG4 FPGAs on our next-generation software-defined radio and also image processing computer, which we are designing for several NASA and international scientific space missions,” said David Strobel, CEO of Space Micro Inc, of San Diego, California. “We believe the high performance and rich feature set of the RTG4 FPGAs, together with our proprietary advanced processing algorithms, will make for a winning combination, creating great value for our space and missile customers.”

“The introduction of RTG4 FPGAs affirms our strong commitment to the space industry as the leading supplier of FPGAs for applications requiring mitigation of radiation effects,” said Ken O’Neill, director of marketing, space and aviation at Microsemi. “RTG4 FPGAs combine a wealth of features with the highest quality and reliability to meet the increasing demands of modern satellite payloads.”

Key product features include:

Up to 150,000 logic elements; each includes a four-input combinatorial look-up table (LUT4) and a flip-flop with built-in single event upset (SEU) and single event transient (SET) mitigation
High system performance, up to 300 MHz
24 serial transceivers, with operation from 1 Gb/sec to 3.125 Gb/sec
16 SEU- and SET-protected SpaceWire clock and data recovery circuits
462 SEU- and SET-protected multiply-accumulate mathblocks
More than 5 Mbits of on-board SEU-protected SRAM
Single event latch-up (SEL) and configuration memory upset immunity
Total ionizing dose (TID) beyond 100 Krad

Availability
Engineering silicon, Libero SoC development software and RTG4 development kits are available now. RTG4 FPGAs and development kits have already shipped to some of the 120+ customers engaged in the RTG4 lead customer program. Flight units qualified to MIL-STD-883 Class B are expected to be available in early 2016.

Microsemi will present more information on RTG4 FPGAs in a live webinar on May 6 and will also be hosting Microsemi Space Forum events in the U.S., India and Europe starting in June, presenting information on RTG4 FPGAs and the extensive range of Microsemi space products.

To learn more about the new RTG4 technology and upcoming events visit http://www.microsemi.com/products/fpga-soc/radtolerant-fpgas/rtg4 or contact Microsemi’s sales team at [email protected].