Honeywell intros rad-hard ASICs for space segment

Honeywell International's microelectronics products group is introducing rad-hard ASICs and memory at this week's National Space Symposium. These bring space-based VLSI circuits to densities and performance usually seen in commercial CMOS. The HX5000 ASIC line also is the first rad-hard ASIC to have a dedicated design-tool environment, developed jointly by Honeywell and Synopsys Inc.

Gregg Panning, microelectronic product manager at Honeywell, said the ASICs are produced in a facility in Plymouth, Minnesota, rated as a Trusted Foundry by the National Security Agency. This means that not only are the fab and test area secure, but the supply chain itself is assured, making certain third parties do not have access to design details. This is important in HX5000 applications, because the majority of designs are used either in aerospace weapon systems, such as missiles, or in military satellites, which may have high levels of classification.

The ASIC family uses different combinations of logic gates and SRAM, allowing designs as large as 15 million gates of combined logic and memory. Honeywell offers a Serdes macrocell that supports I/O speeds of up to 3Gbit/s. All ASICs are based on a 150nm QML-certified silicon-on-insulator (SOI) CMOS process.

Along with the ASICs, Honeywell is debuting two SRAMs of 4Mbit and 16Mbit densities, allowing upgrades to space systems currently relying on 256K and 1M SRAMs. The 4M HXS6408 and 16M HXS1608 are both based on the same SOI CMOS process

- Loring Wirbel
EE Times