Actel Announces Availability of MIL-STD 883 Class B Qualified Four-Million Gate RTAX4000S

High-density Radiation-tolerant FPGAs Represent the Most Reliable Solution for Mission-critical Space Designs

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., January 28, 2008 — Achieving another milestone in its overall strategy to help designers to maximize reliability, minimize power consumption, and save board space and weight in mission-critical space systems, Actel Corporation today announced it has completed the stringent MIL-STD 883 Class B qualification of its four-million gate radiation-tolerant RTAX-S field-programmable gate array (FPGA). The high-density RTAX4000S device has completed 1,000 hours of high-temperature operating life (HTOL) testing and nearly 80,000 total hours of life testing data to date. This device specific testing data is in addition to the more than 2,000,000 device hours of testing and rapidly accumulating flight heritage achieved by the remainder of the RTAX-S family. The qualification of the device, combined with its usable error-corrected on-board memory and large number of user I/O, make it ideal for high-bandwidth processing applications in spacecraft payloads. Rigorous testing and qualification of the RTAX4000S toward QML Class Q and QML Class V certification continues.

"We continue to build and support our highly successful RTAX-S product portfolio," said Ken O'Neill, director of marketing, military and aerospace at Actel Corporation. "No other FPGA delivers the high density, radiation tolerance and the reliability of the RTAX4000S device. To further meet customer requirements, we are testing and qualifying these parts to the most stringent standards — from 883 Class B to QML Class V, assuring our customers that these programmable solutions can withstand even the most extreme conditions in space."

Hardened by design against radiation single-event upsets (SEUs), the nonvolatile RTAX4000S requires no radiation mitigation techniques. Competing high-density FPGA solutions require user-instantiated triple module redundancy (TMR), which can consume more than two-thirds of the device's available logic. The RTAX4000S offers the inherent flexibility of the programmable fabric, delivering cost and time-to-market advantages over radiation-hardened (RH)-ASICs with their long lead times and high up-front tooling charges that, in combination with minimal volume requirements for many space applications, often translate to higher total solution costs.

Availability

The RTAX4000S device, the largest member of the successful RTAX-S family, is available now. For further information about pricing and availability, please contact Actel.

About Actel
Attacking power consumption from both the chip and the system levels, Actel Corporation's innovative FPGAs and programmable system chip solutions enable power-efficient design. The company is traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol ACTL and is headquartered at 2061 Stierlin Court, Mountain View, Calif., 94043-4655. For more information about Actel, visit http://www.actel.com.