LEWIZ COMMUNICATIONS, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N231-073

Description

As silicon technology moves to deep nano-meter process, the trend for FPGA companies is to concentrate on commercial products and moves away from developing large FPGA chips specifically for radiation hardened (RH) applications requiring high radiation dosage.  The volume of rad-hard chip market is small relative to the commercial sector.  Newer FPGA chips are only offered as radiation tolerant (not Rad-Hard) and will not meet the Navy topic requirements for dosage, latch-up threshold, or circumvention and recovery time. As the trend continue, it’s unlikely large RH, high total ionization dose FPGA device will exist in the near future.  The problem further exacerbated as deep-nano meter silicon fabs currently do not offer RH silicon process - mainly due to economic reason. In addition, rad-tolerant FPGA chips are very expensive. Our proposal will provide fully RH FPGA chips at 1/3 the cost. Dosage and latch up threshold met the requirements even for deep space applications, and support C&R time of orders of magnitude better. For this SBIR project, in Phase 1 Base (6 month), we will design and verify the MxN array, fully radiation hardened FPGA core. In Phase 1 option period (6 month), we will define and design an SoC FPGA chip based on the new RH-FPGA-Core and target it for GF 12LP silicon process. This proposal will meet or exceed the Navy requirements.