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.

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.

"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."

Features:

－ 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