The Air Force awarded Xilinx a $23.5 million contract to
implement radiation hardening (RHBD) within their existing
architecture and design methodology implemented with newly
released Virtex-5 family of Field-programmable ate array (FPGA)
using the latest 65 nm technology. These microchips contain
multi-million gates, designed with Single-event effects Immune
Reconfigurable FPGA (SIRF). Through the development effort,
all the FPGA's logic blocks will be inspected to determine
susceptible elements and migrate against single effects (SEU).
Implementing radiation hardened Virtex-5 will enable designers
to employ architecture that potentially eliminates the need
for multiple redundant instantiations and voting, and allow
system developers greater flexibility in space and missile
applications.