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A $16m defense award buys qualification for BAE's 45nm rad-hard ASIC library
The money pays for demonstration and qualification of BAE's RH45 process, and what US satellite teams would get from it is a catalog of pre-tested rad-hard blocks to assemble into custom ASICs. The catalog is BAE's own.
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What happened
- BAE Systems received $16 million in defense funding to demonstrate and qualify RH45, its radiation-hardened 45-nanometer semiconductor technology.
- The RH45 Storefront offers space agencies and defense contractors pre-tested radiation-resistant building blocks they can assemble into custom application-specific integrated circuits.
- Fabrication runs at GlobalFoundries' plant in Malta, New York on 45nm silicon-on-insulator, and final assembly, packaging and test happen at BAE's Manassas, Virginia site, an accredited Category 1A Microelectronics Trusted Source.
- Russia's Phobos-Grunt was stranded in Earth orbit in 2011, and among the stated causes was heavy ions striking unhardened commercial off-the-shelf chips, corrupting memory and forcing a fatal reboot.
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Why it matters
- capability A satellite team can scope a rad-hard ASIC around functions somebody else has already characterised, instead of proving each one from scratch for every mission.
- cost Defense money is qualifying a library BAE owns, so the catalog that comes out of it has one supplier behind every block on the shelf.
- constraint Until the qualification work closes, a program cannot treat an RH45 block as a flight-qualified part, which limits who can commit a design against it now.
- decision Picking 45nm rad-hard over a smaller, cheaper commercial part is a decision about which orbital failure modes a program is willing to carry.
The engineer specifying a flight computer works from a short list, and the list is short because every part on it arrives with radiation test data attached. The RH45 Storefront is built for that engineer. interestingengineering.com describes it as a set of pre-tested blocks a customer assembles into a custom ASIC, so that a new satellite design does not start from a blank sheet [4][16].
The award pays to demonstrate and qualify [1]. A block cannot enter a design review until both of those close [14]. interestingengineering.com does not name the funding office or give a date for qualification [15].
Joe Dziezynski, Space Systems product line director at BAE Systems, put the pitch in terms of choice. "Design flexibility is important when it comes to supporting space missions," he said [5]. "Our RH45 ASIC library is a unique and trusted capability that allows our customers to target specific functions while meeting radiation-hardened requirements" [6]. The library is BAE's own. interestingengineering.com describes the funding as validating the company's proprietary RH45 chips and unlocking a secure, onshore hardware catalog for defense builders [12], and frames the US fabrication as reducing reliance on overseas supply chains for sensitive defense hardware [13].
Smaller geometry is worse here. Commercial parts are fast and cheap, and a single stray high-energy proton can flip bits or permanently burn out a processor [8]. As commercial chips shrink, they get more sensitive to tiny electric charges [11]. Radiation is one of the leading causes of satellite anomalies and mission failures, according to interestingengineering.com [9].
The storefront is usable on a given program when the library already holds the function you need. If it does not, the schedule has to absorb a qualification campaign that finishes later than planned. A team with an existing block and slack in its dates can design against RH45 now. A team that needs a new block and has a launch slot carries the schedule risk of that campaign, and should budget for it.
For teams that would rather not run an ASIC program at all, BAE is building the RH45 technology into its next-generation Endura single-board computers, described as high-speed, low-power processing units built for orbit [7].
What to watch
- A named qualification milestone or completion date for RH45, and identification of the funding office behind the $16 million.
- The first customer ASIC taped out from the storefront library, or an Endura single-board computer with a flight order attached.
- Whether the block library ships with radiation test data that outside designers can review before they commit a design.