Space Qualified, Radiation Hardened, Dense Monolithic Flash Memory

Radiation hardened nonvolatile memories for space is still primarily confined to EEPROM. There is high density effective or cost effective NVM solution available to space electronics designers. DoD, NASA, and DTRA R&D investment funding of CRAM, MRAM, and FRAM at the major players (BAE Systems and Honeywell) over the past 10-15 years have not yet resulted in cost effective, high density, producible available space products. Flash memory offers the high density and low price, but the current COTS flash devices are susceptible to Single Event Effects of SEU (Upset) and SEFI (Functional Interrupt and block errors). Bit flips (Upsets) may be tolerable for certain types of data, but if they occur in the processing instructions, functional errors can result in corrupt data at best and lock-up of the Flash circuit at worst. Space Micro is proposing to mitigate SEU and SEFI in space applications by application of patented techniques and leveraging pure commercial IC processes. SEU and its effects of bit and block errors can be effectively corrected with Triple Modular Redundancy (TMR), while SEFI is mitigated with Space Micro patent-pending HF-CoreTM recovery technology. The end goal is a form-fit-function compatible monolithic IC which is footprint compatible with commercial 4, 8, and future 16-Gb Flash devices.