Total ionizing dose effects of optical components on an optically reconfigurable gate array

Abstract

Recently, optically reconfigurable gate arrays (ORGAs) have been developed as radiation-hardened field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) to realize a 10 Mrad total ionizing dose-tolerance. Specifically, ORGAs offer important benefits of high-speed reconfiguration, numerous reconfiguration contexts, and robust configuration. These three factors are important to remove the soft-error of a configuration circuit on a programmable gate array and to increase the total ionizing dose tolerance. Although the robust configuration capability has been confirmed using radiation emulation, no actual radiation experiment has been reported to date in the relevant literature. This paper therefore presents experiments demonstrating the enhanced radiation tolerance of an optically reconfigurable gate array using a cobalt-60 gamma radiation source.