Comment by dreamcompiler

> fancy radiation-hardened versions

Ha! What's special about rad-hard chips is that they're old designs. You need big geometries to survive cosmic rays, and new chips all have tiny geometries.

So there are two solutions:

1. Find a warehouse full of 20-year old chips.

2. Build a fab to produce 20-year old designs.

Both approaches are used, and both approaches are expensive. (Approach 1 is expensive because as you eventually run out of chips they become very, very valuable and you end up having to build a fab anyway.)

There's more to it than just big geometries but that's a major part of the solution.