Renesas offers industry's highest-performance SAR analog-to-digital converter

Renesas Electronics Corporation, a supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, has announced the industry’s highest-performance, single-chip 14-Bit, 1-MSPS successive-approximation-register (SAR) analog-to-digital converter (ADC) for radiation-hardened (rad-hard) space applications.

Renesas’ Intersil brand ISL73141SEH delivers best-in-class dynamic and static performance, including signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), an effective number of bits (ENOB), an integral non-linearity (INL), and a differential non-linearity (DNL).

The ADC fully resets after every sample, clearing any errors that result from a single event upset (SEU) due to heavy-ion radiation during spaceflight.

The ISL73141SEH is one of the key signal-path building blocks in long-duration geosynchronous/geostationary Earth orbit (GEO) communication satellites and manned spacecraft, including lunar space missions.

By delivering the industry’s best dynamic and static performance, the new 14-bit ADC accurately captures real-world analog transmissions and converts them for processing in the digital domain. The ISL73141SEH ADC is one of seven ICs, including:

A rad-hard temperature sensor
Multiplexer
Quad op amp
ADC driver
LDO
Voltage reference to form a complete sensor interface signal chain solution that accelerates telemetry, tracking, as well as control (TT&C)
A flight computer system development.

“The ISL73141SEH offers satellite and spacecraft manufacturers the ultimate in ADC performance combined with a best-in-class sensor interface signal chain,” said Philip Chesley, VP, Industrial and Communications Business Division at Renesas.

The space-grade ISL73141SEH is fully characterized for enhanced low dose rate-sensitivity (ELDRS) radiation performance up to 75krad(Si) for total ionizing dose (TID) and linear energy transfer (LET) up to 86MeV*cm2/mg for single event effects (SEE). The SEE testing also shows no single event latch-up (SEL) or single event burnout (SEB).

“Our space-grade 14-bit ADC delivers significantly better data converter performance than any other competing solution, and it is backed by six decades of leadership in radiation performance testing and characterization that gives spaceflight customers the mission assurance they demand,” added Chesley.

Additionally, single event transients (SETs) have been mitigated by testing at a LET range up to 86MeV*cm2/mg.

Features

A 1-MSPS throughput rate with no data latency and no missing codes
A 5V supply; dissipates only 60mW
High SNR of 82.1dBFS at a 5V supply operation
Operating from a 3.3V supply at 750 KSPS, dissipates only 28mW
Single supply operation simplifies system design
The highest dynamic performance of 13.3 ENOB, enabling > 12-bit resolution
Superior linearity: ±0.5 LSB INL and ±0.2 LSB DNL
Full military temperature range of -55°C to +125°C

TT&C and flight computer
The ISL73141SEH 14-Bit, 1-MSPS SAR ADC is at the heart of the sensor interface signal chain and connects via SPI interface to MPUs, MCUs, and/or FPGAs to digitize sensor signals in digital TT&C subsystems and flight computers.

System designers can build the entire signal chain with Renesas’ Intersil brand analog and power ICs, including: