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The Electron d’Or Award Winner Can Withstand A Nuclear Meltdown…Almost

July 03, 2015 by Jennifer A. Diffley

Microsemi's RTG4™ high-speed signal processing radiation-tolerant field programmable gate array (FPGA) product family wins the Electron d'Or award...for good reason.

Microsemi's RTG4™ high-speed signal processing radiation-tolerant field programmable gate array (FPGA) product family wins the Electron d'Or award...for good reason.

Microsemi, known for its semiconductor solutions, was just awarded the Electron d'Or award for its RTG4 family of high-speed signal processing radiation-tolerant field programmable gate arrays. The product line can operate in the harshest radiation environments, which makes its impressive performance even more impressive, considering that it can perform well even in outer space. If data errors do occur due to, say, radiation, the flip-flops in the logic cells and mathblocks will mitigate them. One-bit errors are automatically corrected.

 

 

"RTG4 integrates Microsemi's fourth-generation flash-based FPGA fabric and high-performance interfaces on a single chip while maintaining the resistance to radiation-induced configuration upsets in the harshest radiation environments, such as space flight, high altitude aviation, medical electronics and nuclear power plant control," said Ken O'Neill, director of marketing, space and aviation at Microsemi.

The Electron d'Or award is presented by the Electroniques magazine and is determined by an independent jury comprised of international experts in the electronics industry. The jury looks at--among other criteria--the impact a device will have on the market, so if the RTF4 beat out hundreds of other opponents, it's destined to be a major player.

Microsemi's RTF4 family proves that robust technology doesn't need to be sensitive to its environment, which means that everything from space missions to nuclear plants can have tremendous electronic capability without worrying about electronic meltdowns.