Achronix Semiconductor Corporation

Military and aerospace products are used in extreme environments, from the high-radiation environment in space to the extreme heat environment of down-hole operations, reliability is a critical requirement. When selecting a target device the first key attribute evaluated by designers developing FPGA solutions for military, industrial, and aerospace products invariably will be device reliability.

The Achronix picoPIPE™ acceleration technology possesses unique robust properties enabling the device to operate reliably in harsh environments at ultra-high-speed performance levels. The picoPIPE acceleration technology functions reliably over a wide temperature and operating voltage range by design.

The core picoPIPE FPGA voltage can be reduced below the nominal level to lower the power requirements of the Speedster^® FPGA. Lowering the device core voltage yields a reduced device power consumption at a lower operating frequency providing FPGA designers with a straight forward power versus speed trade-off mechanism.

In addition to the inherent robustness of the picoPIPE acceleration technology Achronix developed a Redundancy Voting Circuit (RVC) mitigation methodology to protect user designs from Single Event Effects (SEE) for devices targeted for operation in a radiation environment.

The built-in RVC methodology protects FPGA functionality from Single Event Transient (SET) and Single Event Upset (SEU) effects, thereby significantly increasing the reconfigurable radiation-hardened device reliability and ease of user implementation. The RVC circuits will be deployed in a radiation-hardened device being jointly developed with BAE Systems on a 150 nm radiation-hardened process. The combination of these technologies will result in the industries first SEU and SET hardened reconfigurable FPGA targeting speeds of 200 MHz.

Achronix has committed itself to making a range of robust product solutions available to FPGA designers from devices designed specifically for radiation applications to military and industrial applications with the 65 nm Speedster devices. Speedster devices are screened to Industrial and Military temperature ranges will be available for extreme temperature environment applications.

The Achronix Speedster device configuration is held in a standard SRAM memory cell. In addition, the Achronix Speedster devices support 256-bit AES encryption of the device configuration information. This feature allows customers to protect their core technology and information, and prevent tampering. A user-defined 256-bit AES key can be programmed into the 256-bit non-volatile key provided in the Speedster FPGA.

The Speedster FPGA solution provides designers of military, industrial, and aerospace products with a secure, ultra high-speed reconfigurable and reliable FPGA solution.