PISCATAWAY, N.J., 19 Jan. 2006. Structured Materials Industries, Inc. has been awarded a Phase II SBIR contract to develop Hardened By Design (HBD) high-density SRAM using commercial foundries.
SRAM is static random access memory, a type of data storage that requires power to hold its content. It is used for high-speed registers, caches and relatively small memory banks such as a frame buffer on a display adapter. In contrast, the main memory in a desktop computer is typically dynamic RAM.
The SMI approach leverages state-of-the-art fabrication technology with proven HBD design techniques that enable a significant increase in usable memory density for aerospace applications over existing solutions.
Further, the developed technology will be broadly applicable to other commercially produced integrated circuits.
Existing radiation hardened SRAM solutions are produced in relatively small volumes without large-scale foundry manufacturing. In this program, SMI is modifying an existing design to achieve radiation hardness of a SRAM at the lowest possible cost of manufacture and highest possible yield.
This effort is sequential to the SMI Phase I proof-of-concept effort that demonstrated in excess of 1.3E10 Rad(Si)/sec prompt dose resistance of SRAM test structures. The Phase II effort will produce prototype devices for evaluation that are scalable through at least 16M on existing commercial foundries.
Structured Materials Industries, Inc. (SMI), Piscataway, N.J., is focused on being the leader in MOCVD (metal organic chemical vapor deposition) and related technologies. For more information, see www.structuredmaterials.com.
