Actel's RTAX-S Hits
Major Reliability Milestone
Actel recently announced that its radiation-tolerant RTAX-S product family has successfully accumulated more than 1.4 million device-hours of life test data, which has yielded a failure in time (FIT) number of 12.76.
A benchmark for the reliability of a product, one FIT is defined as one failure in 1 billion hours. Such a low FIT rate for a relatively new product is a huge testament to the reliability of the product.
During the course of reliability testing, 120 RTAX-S FPGAs each completed 6,000 hours of hightemperature operating life (HTOL) testing. Details of the reliability testing performed on the RTAX-S family can be found in the paper, "RTAX-S Testing Reliability Update".
Designed to withstand the rigors of space-flight applications, the radtolerant Actel RTAX-S family offers unique features desirable for space-flight applications, including single-event upset (SEU)-hardened flipflops with built-in triple module redundancy (TMR), 300 kbits usable error-corrected on-board memory and a large number of user I/O. The family also includes the 4-million gate RTAX4000S, the industry's largest space-optimized programmable logic device.
DO-254 for Programmable Devices
Adopted by the Federal Aviation Administration, the DO-254/EU80 (Design Assurance Guidance for Airborne Electronic Hardware) specification provides design assurance guidance for the development of "safe" airborne electronic hardware, including FPGA designs intended for flight use.
With the industry's first hardware/software verification package to ease DO-254 certification, Actel and Aldec are alleviating the verification bottleneck in the design assurance process. The hardware/software verification platform includes software tools to capture and compare simulation data with a golden set of vectors as well as a customized board for the functional verification phase of the DO-254 compliance process.
Actel's Protocol Design Services Group offers design and verification services and solutions for customers designing FPGA-based avionics applications that require DO-254 compliance. The Protocol DO-254 design and process flow expertise combined with the new Actel and Aldec verification platform could be instrumental in ensuring the flight-worthiness and safety of avionics designs.
