Catalog of SIP Cores
System on Chip design resources
System on Chip design resources
August 3, 2026 -
Most chips live an easy life with room temperature, clean power and a steady supply. The chips in this article do not. They sit inside nuclear reactors, ride on satellites and work next to particle beams, where a single stray particle can corrupt data or destroy a device.
In those places radiation is the enemy and standard electronics do not last. This talk is about how two Belgian companies solve that together. Magics Technologies designs radiation-hardened ICs, and Sofics designs the on-chip protection that keeps their interfaces alive. Both build on TSMC CMOS, so they get modern performance and supply while still surviving conditions that off-the-shelf parts cannot.
Radiation damages chips in two ways and both matter for a part that has to keep working for years in the field.
The first is total ionizing dose or TID. Ionizing radiation deposits charge that gets trapped in the gate and isolation oxides. That trapped charge shifts transistor threshold voltages and opens up leakage paths, so the circuit slowly drifts out of spec and eventually stops working. TID is cumulative, which means a part can pass every test on day one and still fail halfway through a mission.
The second is single event effects or SEE. Here a single high-energy particle strikes the silicon and dumps dense charge along its track in an instant. Depending on where it lands you get a soft error, such as a flipped memory bit or a hard one, such as latch-up that draws runaway current and destroys the device. Soft errors corrupt data and hard errors end the mission.
Nuclear plants, space, medical imaging and particle research all expose electronics to this. A normal commercial part is designed for a benign environment, with no margin for threshold drift and no defense against latch-up, so it is simply not built to survive.
Demand for radiation-hardened electronics keeps rising. Space exploration is accelerating, with missions to Mars, plans for a moon base and competition among private spaceflight companies. Aging nuclear plants from the 1960s and 70s are being decommissioned and some are now being recommissioned to power AI and data centers. Fusion research is expanding, and medical imaging keeps advancing. The market reflects all of it and the forecast in Figure 1. captures the trend.