Progress update on honeywell's deep trek high temperature electronics project

The U.S. Department of Energy's Deep Trek program focuses on development and commercial application of drilling and completion technologies in order to recover deep oil/gas resources. Under this program Honeywell, in collaboration with a consortium of industrial partners, is applying Silicon-On-Insulator (SOI) CMOS technology to develop electronic components that operate reliably in very hot (>225°C) environments to support deep well drilling. The program was awarded in 2003 and concludes in mid-2007. In additon to the SOI process, the program scope includes high temperature simulation models, design toolkits, and libraries for new component development. The program is developing an EEPROM, a Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA), a dual precision operational amplifier, and a high resolution (18-bit) analog-to-digital converter. These components are developed for reliable long-term operation (15-years at 150C, 5 years at 225C). A simple system controlled by a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) and Electrically Erasable Programmable Read-Only-Memory (EEPROM) can support down-hole data-logging applications. The FPGA is SRAM-based with an 80 X 80 array of programmable logic blocks (30,000 usable gates) and is ideal for use as reconfigurable coprocessor or other computationally intensive logic structures. The FPGA is functionally equivalent to the AT6010 made by ATMEL® Corporation. The EEPROM, which is in development, will be used to store FPGA configuration data. The FPGA will also be able to write and read to/from the EEPROM for data logging purposes. The EEPROM organization is 32k X 8-bits and can be configured as a functional equivalent to 28C256 parallel interface EEPROM or 25C256 SPI serial interface EEPROM. Circuitry in the EEPROM and FPGA allows synchronization of power-on initialization and configuration to guard against "dirty" power environment operation. This paper provides an update on the progress of the program, as well as discussion of additional high-temperature electronics component and infrastructure needs and outlook.