More and more electronics are needed for very harsh environments, which then results in the need for multiple electronic components. For instance, oil and gas drilling, where temperatures reach up to 200°C require complete solutions for intelligent down hole tools to find and recover resources for energy production.
We’ve been working on high temperature integrated circuits (IC) for this market for several years and have developed a complete signal chain solution of microcontrollers, digital signal processer (DSP), amplifiers, data converters, power, and interface functions, but the one area missing has been non-volatile memory. Now, thanks to the SM28VLT32-HT, there’s a high temperature flash memory device capable of reading and writing up to 210°C. This device eliminates the need for costly up-screening and qualification testing of industrial-grade components for use outside their standard operating range.
The SM28VLT32-HT has a capacity of 4-MBytes and is the industry's first high-temperature, nonvolatile Flash memory device designed for harsh environments. It is qualified and tested across the entire temperature range to provide robust read/write operation over the device's operating life. Designed utilizing our 180nm CMOS flash process, it is built on the same process technology that allows our ARM7 and motor control DSPs to operate at 210°C.
Since size is a big concern in many of these applications, the SM28VLT32-HT was designed from the ground up to support extreme temperatures. It is also available as a Known Good Die (KGD) to support higher levels of integration into multi-chip modules. This use of a serial SPI interface simplifies design and packaging, and reduces pin count.
The availability of high temperature non-volatile memory will enable more capabilities in many harsh environment applications. The HT Flash offers designers more options for reading and writing to memory at temperatures greater than 210°C and provides reliable solutions for logging data or storing programs.
