Designers of spaceflight-qualified systems have a great need to reduce development time, cost, and risk in their systems. Microchip Technology Inc. proposed the concept of starting with Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) devices and then replacing them with space-qualified, Radiation-Tolerant (RT) equivalent parts. Microchip announces it has extended its family of COTS-based, RT SuperFlash options for these applications and is bringing the Microchip memory technology’s unrivaled 50 kilorad (krad) Total Ionizing Dose (TID) tolerance to a 64-Mbit serial quad I/O NOR flash memory device for use in harsh aerospace and defense system environments.Microchip SuperFlash NOR flash memory products use a proprietary split-gate cell architecture to improve performance, data retention, and reliability as compared to conventional stacked gate flash. They eliminate the complexity of power management switching to achieve their industry high TID even while the flash is still biased and operating in systems such as satellite onboard computers and different types of controllers for motors, sensors, solar panels, and power distribution. Proven in industrial applications, Microchip’s RT SuperFlash technology has been offered as a parallel-interface solution with its 64-Mbit SST38LF6401RT device that is now space-qualified and available in-flight models. With the SST26LF064RT product, designers now also have a serial quad I/O 64Mbit memory option.
An application note explains how to use the serial 64-Mbit SuperFlash device with Microchip’s SST26LF064RT RT flash reference evaluation board and space-qualified SRAM-based FPGAs. Like Microchip’s parallel SuperFlash memory, the serial SuperFlash option can also be used as configuration memory with an FPGA and other Microchip solutions such as the Arm Cortex-M7- based SAMRH707 radiation-hardened microcontroller (MCU). It can also be used with the RT PolarFire FPGA to support in-flight system reconfiguration.
Microchip’s RT SST26LF064RT SuperFlash memory product ceramic samples are available for sale Additionally, the SST38LF6401RT (parallel) ceramic and plastic qualified flight models are available for sale. The devices are complemented by the RT FPGA (RTG4 and RT Polarfire), Rad Hard microprocessor SAMRH71, and Rad Hard microcontroller SAMRH707.
