HARDSIL is described by the company as a node-, foundry- and product-agnostic solution. In plain terms, it adds extra implant steps to an otherwise standard chip-fabrication flow, using the equipment fabs already own. The result is a device that can shrug off radiation and heat that would kill a commercial part - without forcing customers onto a proprietary, low-volume production line.
That approach separates VORAGO from the traditional rad-hard model, where radiation-hardened silicon has historically meant expensive, custom, export-controlled parts produced in tiny quantities. By meeting customers on familiar Arm Cortex-M cores and standard manufacturing, VORAGO lowers both the cost and the learning curve of building for extreme environments.
The company sells the outcome in three flavors. Rad-hard parts target the most punishing missions - deep space, high-radiation orbits, defense systems - with tolerance above 200 krad. Rad-tolerant parts trade some hardness for cost, aimed at low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations that fly cheaper hardware in larger numbers. And high-temperature parts serve terrestrial extremes such as subsurface drilling.
It is an unglamorous kind of engineering, and that is precisely the point. The durability lives inside the manufacturing process, invisible to the end user, right up until the moment a chip keeps working when it was supposed to fail.
