Driven dissipative steady state entanglement schemes take advantage of coupling to the environment to robustly prepare highly entangled states. We present a scheme for two trapped ions to generate a maximally entangled steady state with fidelity above 0.99, appropriate for use in quantum protocols. Furthermore, we extend the scheme by introducing detection of our dissipation process, significantly enhancing the fidelity. Our scheme is robust to anomalous heating and requires no sympathetic cooling.Decoherence is notorious for being a major obstacle to the development of quantum technologies that require sustained quantum coherence. Typically, the interaction of a quantum system with its surrounding environment drives the system towards states with no traces of quantum behaviour. However, it has long been recognised that this does not have to be the case: by combining the irreversible decoherence dynamics with suitably chosen Hamiltonian evolution, one can design artificial reservoirs to steer the system to the desired stationary states. This quantum reservoir engineering method [1] has been used to investigate decoherence [2,3] and to design robust non-classical states [4] in the motional degrees of freedom of trapped ions.More recently, the interest in designing dissipative processes has been renewed with proposals to engineer manybody quantum states [5,6] and even perform quantum computation [6]. Engineered reservoirs are robust to preexisting natural decoherence sources [4] and also to variations of parameters and initial conditions. This has led to a number of proposals to prepare and stabilise quantum steady-states in a variety of systems [7,8], including cavity quantum electrodynamics [9,10], optomechanical systems [11,12], and superconducting qubits [13]. Although experimentally challenging, engineered dissipation has been used to generate entanglement in atomic ensembles [14], to implement quantum operations in ion traps [15], and more recently to prepare Bell states in superconducting qubits [16] and in ion traps [17].Despite the intrinsic robustness of dissipative driven dynamics, the steady-state fidelities achieved in recent trapped ion experiments are far below the high fidelities achieved with more traditional time-dependent entangling gates [18] and, therefore, still much lower than the fidelities required for a quantum information processing (QIP) system [18,19]. In [15], for example, the entangling mechanism relies on successive applications of quantum gates to generate a quantum operation. Even though a fidelity of 0.91 has been achieved for a single cycle, fidelity decreases as the dynamics approach the continuous dissipative master equation limit. In contrast, Lin et al. [17] used continuous, time-independent fields and achieved fidelities of up to 0.75 that could be boosted to 0.89 using stepwise application of laser fields. In this case, the fidelity is limited by the intrinsic loss mechanisms present in the particular continuous driving scheme adopted.In this paper we propose a steady-stat...