[sdiy] Proposed DSP board

[Rainer Buchty]

On Thu, 22 Jan 2009, Eric Brombaugh wrote:

> Actel's are used extensively in Hi-Rel & harsh environments.

You do know the story about those magic healing powers of the antifuses? :)

Need to dig out the article from some older mail...

> SRAM-based FPGAs are susceptible to soft-errors when hit by radiation.

Which doesn't mean that you cannot use them in hard-radiation 
environments. For instance, the CERN's Alice trigger[0] uses a buttload 
of Virtex-4 for the first level filtering of the experiment data.

There was some nice talk on ARCS 2006 on what they did to get the 
radiation-induced problems out of their way -- in fact, they are 
constantly reconfiguring the machine.

[0] simultaneously reads 1.2 million 10-bit 10MSPS input channels 
    (-> 17TB/sec) and calculates up to 100.000 traces in less than 
    6 microseconds using 280.000 dedicated processor cores arranged
    as 70.000 multi chip modules (equalling 700 square meaters)

    Readout of those processors takes place in less than 600ns via 1080
    2.5GBit/s fibers to be processed by the systolic FPGA processor.