Radiation and High-Voltage Tolerant Space CAN Driver in Standard Low-Voltage 3.3-V CMOS Technology

The control area network (CAN) wired communication standard is becoming the bus of choice for many space applications. However, the severe -2 to 7 V common-mode and -3 to 16 V failure tolerance requirements of the CAN bus driver have restricted its implementation of commercial high-voltage processes with transistors tolerant to voltages above 16 V. These transistors experience sensitivity to single-event gate rupture (SEGR) and single-event breakdown (SEB) radiation events and have led to the limited diffusion of commercial available CAN transceivers in space applications. This paper demonstrates, for the first time, that a radiation-tolerant CAN driver can also be realized with the radiation-tolerant low-voltage design against radiation effects (DARE) mixed-mode 180-nm CMOS technology. This has been made possible by the development of a specific driver circuit that increases in static and dynamic operations of the technology voltage handling range from 3.3 to 16 V, while maintaining the radiation tolerance. This CAN driver has been manufactured and tested under heavy ion radiation in excess of linear energy transfer (LET) of 60 MeVcm
²
/mg. Over the CAN common mode and failure tolerance voltage range up to 16 V, this CAN driver has been tested and found to have a high threshold and low cross section to radiation-induced single-electron transients and an absence of single-event latch-up, SEGR, and SEB sensitivity.