Radiation Hardened Structured ASIC Platform for Rapid Chip Development for Very High Speed System on a Chip (SoC) and Complex Digital Logic Systems

Radiation Hardened Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) provide the highest performance, lowest power and smallest size ICs for Space Missions. To dramatically reduce the development cycle, and reduce cost to tape out, Micro-RDC proposes a Structured ASIC approach. In this methodology, we fix an array of complex logic cells and provide a fixed area array for I/O pads supporting in excess of 400 Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) General Purposes Input/Output (GPIO) pins. In addition, we fix the power grid and the pins associated with power (core and I/O) and ground. Thus, we require only routing in a subset of the metal layers to configure the Structured ASIC for a specific design. This leads to substantial reduction in design and verification time to tape out. Costs are reduced by requiring a subset of mask changes per design. In this work, we will build on Micro-RDC's existing 90nm silicon-proven Radiation Hardened Structured ASIC platform. We will develop a Structured ASIC platform at the 45nm SOI technology node. The objective is to increase clock speeds to hundreds of MHz. Single Event Upset (SEU) immunity is achieved in the sequential logic using Temporal Latch® Technology. We will provide turnkey Register Transfer Language (RTL) to GDSII capability for Radiation Hardened ASICs.