Radiation-hardened programmable device
View Patent ↗A method of programming a radiation-hardened integrated circuit includes the steps of supplying a prototype device including an SRAM memory circuit or programmable key circuit to a customer, having the customer develop working data patterns in the field in the same manner as a reading and writing to a normal RAM memory, having the customer save the final debugged data pattern, delivering the data pattern to the factory, loading the customer-developed data pattern into memory, programming the customer-developed data pattern into a number of production circuits, irradiating the production circuits at a total dosage of between 300K and 1 Meg RAD to burn the data pattern into memory, and shipping the irradiated and programmed parts to the customer.
1. A method of programming a radiation-hardened integrated circuit comprising:
supplying a prototype memory device to a customer;
receiving a final debugged customer-developed data pattern;
loading the customer-developed data pattern into memory;
programming the customer-developed data pattern from the memory into a number of pin-compatible production memory devices;
irradiating the production memory devices sufficiently to burn the data pattern into memory; and
shipping the irradiated and programmed parts to the customer.
2. The method of claim 1 in which programming the customer-developed data pattern comprises:
setting the gate voltage on at least a first N-channel memory transistor to ground; and
setting the gate voltage on at least a second N-channel memory transistor to VDD, wherein the first and second N-channel transistors define a complementary data state.