ON Semiconductor collaborates with ICs LLC to develop radiation-hardened ASICs for aerospace applications

PHOENIX, 25 Nov. 2014. ON Semiconductor (Nasdaq:ONNN) has entered into a licensing/development agreement with ICs LLC to bring to market application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) resilient to radiation effects.

Radiation hardened by design (RHBD) ASICs created through this agreement will be based upon ON Semiconductor’s ONC110 110 nanometer (nm) process for ASIC designs and production. The introduction of RHBD ASICs extends the company’s military and aerospace offering that includes ITAR compliance, DMEA Trusted Supplier accreditation, and DO-254 support.

Radiation testing has exhibited strong single event upset and single event latch-up immunity performance with onset linear energy transfers (LETs) in excess of 100 MeVcm2/mg for the ASICs and double-bit upset immunity of 40 MeVcm2/mg for the dual port SRAM. In addition, a novel RHBD flip-flop architecture has been introduced, referred to as Self Restoring Logic (SRL). The SRL flip flops have shown hardness resilience to single event effects at frequencies of up to 700 megahertz (MHz).

“The mitigation of radiation effects is becoming an increasingly serious issue as the industry moves to smaller semiconductor process architectures,” says Dr. Joe Feeley, CEO at ICs LLC. “Legacy RHBD solutions for SEU immunity do not provide adequate protection for high speed circuits, while SRL does. ON Semiconductor is uniquely able to provide a solution to this important problem and enable customers to produce fault tolerant ASICs for important real time applications.”

Principal targets for these new RHBD ICs will be high reliability (hi-rel) applications, such as space exploration, satellite communication and surveillance, avionics, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commercial aircraft, nuclear energy, particle physics research and military equipment,

“Thanks to this far-reaching agreement with ICs LLC, ON Semiconductor can support our customers’ demands for ASICs requiring a greater number of logic gates and smaller process technologies, while also safeguarding extensively against failures caused by exposure to radiation. When combined with our Trusted source status and our capability to provide highly secure development flows, the addition of RHBD products to our portfolio will mean we are extremely well positioned to serve a broad spectrum of aerospace, military and space programs, where the need for data and IP integrity is of paramount importance,” Vince Hopkin, vice president, Military/Aerospace, Digital and Custom Foundry at ON Semiconductor, adds.