Rad tolerant instrumentation amplifier with integrated differential ADC driver

Intersil Corporation a radiation tolerant 36V instrumentation amplifier (in-amp) featuring an integrated differential analog-to-digital converter (ADC) driver, which it claims is the industry’s first. The high performance ISL70617SEH differential input, rail-to-rail output in-amp delivers the industry’s highest signal processing performance for low-level sensor telemetry data critical to communication satellites. Its high integration and best-in-class performance reduces system size, weight and power (SWAP) costs, and accelerates time to market. The device enables higher common-mode rejection ratio and power supply rejection ratio than the competition, at all gain settings. Designers can easily program the in-amp’s gain from 0.1 to 10,000 using two external resistors. The device is wafer-by-wafer guaranteed to 75krad (Si) with a low dose rate exposure of 10mrad/sec, which more closely resembles the space environment than the high dose rate testing used with competitive devices. It leverages the company’s proprietary silicon on insulator process to provide single event latch-up and single event burnout robustness of 60MeV in heavy ion environments. And its single event transient performance of <10usec eliminates the need for extra filtering. “The ISL70617SEH is the space industry’s first true differential-ended ADC driver,” said Philip Chesley, senior vice president of Precision Products at Intersil. “This extends our portfolio of rad hard products exceeding the mission assurance needs of military and commercial communication satellites.”