Microchip Technology Inc. extends its COTS-based RT SuperFlash option family with the concept of starting with COTS devices and replacing them with space-qualified RT equivalents and brings the unmatched 50krad TID tolerance of its memory technology to 64Mbit serial quad Channel I/O NOR flash devices for harsh aerospace and defense system environments .
"The SST26LF064RT SuperFlash device delivers the best TID performance for a 64Mbit serial quad-way I/O memory solution on the market," said Bob Vampola, vp of Microchip aerospace & defense. Can work with any SRAM-based FPGA in a variety of spatial applications." "It is suitable for low Earth Orbit (LEO) space constellations and other harsh radiation environments that require an accompanying flash memory to store critical software code or bitstreams that drive entire systems."
The company's SuperFlash NOR flash products utilize a proprietary gated cell structure that improves performance, data retention and reliability compared to traditional stacked gate flash. They remove the complexity of power management switching to accomplish their industry high TID even though the flash memory is still biased and running in systems like satellite onboard computers and different types of controllers, sensors, motors, solar cells board and power distribution.
RT SuperFlash technology has proven to be a parallel interface solution in industrial applications, and its devices are now space-qualified and available flight models. Designers now also have a product with a serial quad I/O 64Mbit memory option.
The application note describes how to use a serial 64M SuperFlash device with the RT flash reference evaluation board and space-constrained SRAM-based FPGAs. Like the parallel SuperFlash memory, the serial SuperFlash option can also be used as configuration memory with FPGAs and other microchip solutions such as the Arm Cortex-M7-based SAMRH707 radiation-hardened MCU. It can also be used with RT PolarFire FPGAs to support in-flight system reconfiguration.
