New Chip Provides Greater Development Flexibility at Cost-effective Price for Rad-hard Customized Designs
May 4, 2004 - Atmel® Corporation announced the availability of the AT40KEL040, its first rad-hard in-system re-programmable 3.3-Volt FPGA, with built-in Single Event Upset (SEU) protection. Upgraded from the AT40K40AL, an Atmel commercial SRAM-based FPGA, the AT40KEL040 has been re-designed to meet the stringent radiation requirements of space applications.Developed for low gate count rad-hard designs, the AT40KEL040 offers up to 50K usable ASIC gates and 18-Kbit user-configurable SRAM blocks. It is a cost-effective alternative to mask configured ASICs offering an easy development flow with no Non Recurrent Engineering (NRE cost), shorter time-to-market and no minimum order quantity. The AT40KEL040 is the first product in a family of Atmel rad-hard FPGA, which will eventually enable system makers to develop customized designs up to 200K usable ASIC gates, for aerospace electronics, robots, scientific instruments, or embarked systems.
Produced on Atmel's radiation hardened 0.35 um CMOS process, the AT40KEL040 combines rad-hard capabilities - a latch-up threshold higher than 70-MeV.cm2/mg and a total dose in excess of 200 Krad - with a 60 MHz system speed over the full military temperature range. Hardened by design, the AT40KEL040 configuration memory has a very low sensitivity to SEU, resulting in an upset rate lower than 3E-6 error per device per day in the worst orbit conditions. This innovative built-in SEU protection allows the user to design his/her application without using time-consuming mitigation techniques that can triple FPGA used gate count, thus saving expensive development resources and FPGA cost.
The AT40KEL040 is available to any Atmel standard space quality grades, including QML Q & V and support the Standard Military Drawing (SMD) specifications 5962-03250. Prototypes pricing is $1,400/EU1, 150 each in MQFPF160 package. Pricing for the AT40KEL040 QMLV quality grade in MQFPF160 package is $6,000/EU5, 000 for 25 units. The AT40KEL040 is available now.
