ABSTRACT
Extreme environment technology development at Honeywell is really the story of the development and practical application of the unique properties of silicon-on-insulator (SOI) substrates for high-performance CMOS circuit fabrication. The first radiation-hardened (RH) microelectronics hardware produced at Honeywell was developed during the early 1980s on bulk silicon substrates. Initial development efforts to develop high-performance RH bulk CMOS compromised speed and density relative to commercial bulk CMOS. Since then, RH microelectronics representing more than seven generations of RH CMOS technology have been developed to support a wide range of military and commercial systems. In the almost 30 years since the original RH bulk 4 kb SRAM test chip, today’s RH 150 nm SOI CMOS monolithic 16 Mb SRAM, 64 Mb multi-chip module (MCM), 1 Mb nonvolatile magnetoresistive MRAM, and HX5000 15 M gate application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) with integrated phase lock loop (PLLs) and 3.1875 Gbit/s serial/deserializer (SerDes) products offer more than 4 orders of magnitude greater capability over early circuits.
