[SatNews] Hardened against radiation, without ICs, there would be true challenges to overcome for applications designed for spatial work.

The Northrop Grumman Corp. Aerospace Systems sector in Redondo Beach, Calif., is teaming with integrated circuit specialists Cadence Design Systems in San Jose, Calif. and Freescale Semiconductor in Austin, Texas, to create rad-hard application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for military and space applications. Northrop Grumman (NYSE:NOC) is offering a radiation-hardened by design, 90 nanometer, silicon on insulator (RHBD 90nm SOI) standard cell and intellectual property library for custom ASIC development that includes 340 1-volt standard cell gates; 3.125 gigabit-per-second serializer/deserializer; phase-locked loop; static random access memory compiler; and 1.8- and 2.5-volt input/output buffers.

Radiation hardened by design is a way of making electronic components and systems with radiation protection from damage or malfunctions by ionizing or particle radiation, as well as from radiation exposure to high-energy electromagnetic space radiation. Silicon on insulator is a high-performance semiconductor wafer technology that produces lower-power and higher performance devices for use in a radiation environment like space than traditional bulk silicon techniques, Northrop Grumman officials say. Northrop Grumman and Cadence developed the library with radiation hardening by design techniques. Using a commercial SOI foundry at Freescale Semiconductor in Austin, Texas, experts fabricated several test chips, including a 5-million-gate ASIC. All were tested to validate the library's suitability for space applications.