RADAR - reconfigurable analog and digital array for radiation-hardened circuits

Because of their flexibility and reprogrammability, FPGAs have been proposed for many uses in avionics. Existing commercial FPGAs, being finegrained, are programmable at the bit level, allowing them to be used across a wide range of applications. Compared to an ASIC developed for a specific application, however, such a fine-grained FPGA consumes more power and exhibits higher latency and/or lower throughput. In this paper, we describe RADAR - a coarse-grained, programmable, radiation-hardened array that exhibits power and throughput similar to ASICs, yet contains a high degree of programmability. Containing multipliers, adders, SRAMs and a programmable interconnect, RADAR is customized to the DSP domain and targets applications that require low power and high throughput. The degree of radiation hardening in RADAR is a programmable feature, allowing a tradeoff between radiation hardness, throughput, and power.