Mission Infallible Radiation-hardened Semiconductors

By early 2026, the semiconductor industry had broken through an invisible barrier: the space technology gap had finally collapsed. Radiation-hardened semiconductors suddenly caught up to—and in some domains even surpassed—the commercial mainstream.

Radiation-hardened (a.k.a. rad-hard) electronics used to trail commercial silicon by fifteen to twenty years. As an example: spacecraft that were launched in 2020 carried processors that were architecturally comparable to chips from desktop computers released in the year 2000. This wasn't incompetence—it was physics, economics, and the brutal certification timelines required when failure of a component in a mission means losing a billion-dollar worth of equipment.