A Radiation-Hardened Structured ASIC

Government and military ICs, like their commercial counterparts, are subject to ever-tightening cost, performance, and time-to-market demands. They must also comply with strict lifetime, reliability, and radiation hardness standards. In dealing with these challenges for internal applications, engineers at Sandia National Laboratories developed a radiation-hardened structured ASIC platform. In this article, they describe the design and development of the platform and the associated challenges for FA and test.