When a major automotive firm experienced reliability setbacks with solder joint faults in Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), Ridgetop stepped in with an innovation that raises the bar on detection of problematic “cannot duplicate” intermittent faults.

The environment of high temperatures, vibration, and mechanical stress in automobile engine compartments has a harsh impact on electronic components. However, Ridgetop’s groundbreaking fault detection technology, Solder Joint BIST (SJ BIST™), offers this automotive firm the capacity to constantly monitor FPGA package-to-board integrity for the onset of intermittent faults that are the precursor to catastrophic failure.

SJ BIST allows FPGA users to constantly monitor for high resistance faults in the array of hidden solder joints associated with ball grid array packaging technology. Once detected, SJ BIST alerts a prognostic health management system, which allows for maintenance to be performed before a catastrophic failure occurs. This ability to measure, detect, and predict solder aging and failure in components marks a milestone for improved reliability in electronic systems for harsh environments. SJ BIST’s systematic detection surpasses state of the art, and is adaptable to a variety of like industries.

Designers and manufacturers using sub-90 nm process geometries face adaptation to many challenges encountered in the nanoscale crossover. As sizes shrink, statistical variations grow wider and multivariate relationships expand in number. The logic of the situation is both simple and remorseless. With each process node, geometries shrink, new materials are added, masking steps increase and become more intricate, and design rules ever trickier.

To compensate for the subwavelength lithography bottleneck, design is more complex. As integrated circuit (IC) feature sizes decrease, manufacturing processes become more complex. Process complexity creates new defects while smaller features result in circuits becoming more susceptible to electrical faults. Defect detection must become more sensitive to keep up with each process generation. In the crush of the downward spiral in size, all of the slack in the system is eliminated.

Ridgetop is developing an advanced Detector Prognostics/Health Monitoring (DPHM) system, a centralized software-based tool that acquires and processes diagnostic and prognostic information from detector networks in nuclear physics experiments for the Department of Energy (DOE). 

The DPHM system will monitor detector electronics that are dispersed along the path of particle accelerator beams, including calorimetry sensors, low-noise preamplifiers, analog-to-digital converters (ADCs), and hardware interface electronics. The prognostic data that the system will provide can support condition-based maintenance strategies that enable detector electronics to be serviced before they fail catastrophically.

Ridgetop is developing a high-performance, radiation-hardened, analog-to-digital (ADC) converter for the Department of Energy (DOE). The ADC will be capable of digitizing at high rates to support advanced nuclear physics experiments at DOE-funded research facilities in Illinois, New York, and Virginia to improve radiation tolerance of high-performance Data Converters.

The type of ADC architecture will provide a highly versatile ADC core that can be used in a variety of platforms within the particle physics community.

Ridgetop is developing built-in electronic prognostics providing early detection of impending failures for the net-centric Integrated Air and Missile Defense System of Systems (IAMD SoS) currently under development by the U.S. Army.

Ridgetop will use its advanced physics-of-failure methods to develop embedded prognostics that act as failure "canaries" by providing fault precursors and data on cumulative damage. The prognostics will detect and report remotely, via Web-based networks, potential mission-critical electronic component failures with at least a six-hour warning.