Into Parts Unknown: How Radiation-Tolerant Silicon Enables True Autonomous Mobility

Heather Srigley, Head of Marketing, VORAGO Technologies
December 16, 2025

The Pentagon has requested $13.4 billion for autonomous systems in 2026, including $210 million dedicated to autonomous ground vehicles. That signals incoming demand for unmanned vehicles that drive surveillance, logistics, and combat support. Take, for example, the Army’s newly announced Common Autonomous Multi-Domain Launcher program, which calls on the defense industry to power autonomous mobility for a wider variety of ground missions.

Today’s autonomous defense vehicles are expected to navigate contested terrain, process sensor data in real time, and execute mission directives—all without requiring extensive human involvement or placing personnel at risk.

But as autonomy scales, so does the threat landscape. These vehicles no longer operate solely within controlled environments. They’re deployed across high-EMI (electromagnetic interference) zones, near power-dense equipment, and in mission areas where radiation exposure and high temperatures are real risks.

Of all the electronics on board, the system’s decision-making core is especially vulnerable to radiation-induced soft errors. Even minor exposure can cascade into unpredictable behavior. Defense programs need radiation-resilient microcontroller units (MCUs) and microprocessing units (MPUs) that balance protection, performance, and scalability for autonomous ground systems.

Vulnerable Vehicles as Radiation Risk Grows

Radiation-induced soft errors are a known challenge for autonomous vehicles. When exposure occurs, systems can experience corrupted calculations, disruptions in control logic, or memory upsets that compromise stability.

Now translate those behaviors to an unmanned defense vehicle traveling at speed on uneven terrain, maneuvering around obstacles, or operating near friendly forces. Even a single bit flip can lead to mission loss, platform damage, or safety hazards.

Radiation does not need to come from space to disrupt electronics. Ground systems face exposure from nuclear-adjacent environments, high-altitude passes, localized radiation from communications, radar, and electronic-warfare systems, as well as natural terrestrial radiation sources capable of inducing soft errors.

Autonomous defense vehicles bring together dense compute, tight power budgets, and safety-critical control, which means their MCUs must withstand real-world radiation exposure while maintaining predictable operation.

Why Radiation-Resilient MCUs and MPUs Are Now a Requirement

Traditional approaches to radiation resilience—software filtering, voting algorithms, or redundant boards—add complexity, weight, and cost, making them difficult to scale across fleets of unmanned vehicles. While these methods can mask faults, they don’t eliminate the root cause: silicon that is inherently susceptible to radiation-induced charge events.

For mission-critical ground systems, relying on redundancy alone is both inefficient and risky. A compromised primary node can still introduce unacceptable latency or instability before a backup system intervenes.

MCUs and MPUs designed with silicon-level radiation resilience address the problem directly by engineering protection into the device itself. Radiation-tolerant memory structures and carefully engineered logic paths reduce the likelihood of soft errors at the silicon level. The result is reliability—the quality engineers need most when designing systems that navigate, sense, and decide without continuous human oversight.

Silicon-Level Radiation Resilience: The Most Efficient Path Forward

Silicon-embedded radiation protection provides clear advantages for unmanned ground vehicles, where exposure risk is real but does not typically require the extreme protection levels demanded by deep-space missions.

Radiation Tolerant by Design (RTBD) architectures, a new category defined by VORAGO Technologies, deliver meaningful protection against soft errors while preserving cost efficiency and scalability. Compared to full radiation hardening or heavy redundancy, silicon-level radiation tolerance offers lower system cost, higher inherent reliability, smaller size, weight, and power footprints. Greater architectural flexibility allows engineers to scale autonomy capabilities without redesigning system safeguards.

RTBD differs fundamentally from Radiation Hardened by Process (RHBP) approaches. RHBP technologies deliver the highest levels of protection for the most radiation-intensive environments. RTBD, by contrast, builds radiation tolerance into the silicon in a way that can preserve price/performance and scalability—making it well suited for many on-terrain and near-terrain systems that need meaningful resilience without the cost and overhead of maximum hardening.

As defense programs push toward fleets of unmanned vehicles and interoperable ground robots, this balance between protection and cost becomes essential.

Matching Radiation Resilience to Autonomous Driving Needs

VORAGO’s recently expanded VA4 MCU family builds on more than a decade of silicon-level radiation engineering. The portfolio spans both RTBD and RHBP approaches, allowing engineers to select the right level of protection needed while maintaining 100% pin-to-pin hardware, software and electrically compatibility across autonomous vehicle designs.

To paint a picture, this embedded protection enables a scout vehicle to navigate scorched, nuclear-adjacent reconnaissance zones with confidence. By utilizing a radiation-tolerant MCU in the sensor fusion engine, the system prevents radiation-induced bit flips in critical steering logic—ensuring the vehicle can push deep into hazardous sectors where residual radiation and extreme thermal spikes would paralyze standard electronics. Crucially, this silicon-level resilience eliminates the weight penalty of redundant backup boards, directly enabling the creation of lighter, smaller, and more agile vehicles that can maneuver through contested environments with unprecedented stealth and speed.

For such autonomous defense applications, radiation-tolerant VA4 devices are often the most practical choice. Built on VORAGO’s RTBD architecture, they provide this robust protection against soft errors while remaining 75% more cost-effective than higher-end radiation-hardened VA4 MCUs (suitable for on-terrain lunar missions). With a tolerance for total ionizing dose (TID) levels greater than 30 krad (Si), they align perfectly with the exposure profiles most encountered in terrestrial environments.

Dual Core for More

This same foundation extends to high-precision system management with the VA5 family. As VORAGO’s first family of dual-core Arm® Cortex®-M55 microcontrollers, the VA5 brings exceptional performance, security, and reliability to autonomous system applications.

The increase in processing efficiency creates an immediate operational advantage for sensor-saturated platforms that must fuse complex LiDAR and video streams in milliseconds. By enabling this level of advanced real-time processing, the VA5 allows defense programs to achieve near-zero latency in decision loops (OODA loops), ensuring unmanned vehicles respond with human-equivalent precision without expanding the platform’s SWaP-C envelope.

The compatibility and cost advantages of new rad-tolerant MPUs and MCUs allow engineers to choose the right device calibrated to mission cost, endurance, and performance requirements. As autonomous systems shift from individual experimental prototypes to integrated fleets, that scalability matters as much as radiation tolerance itself.

A Foundation for the Next Gen Autonomous Defense Vehicles

The Pentagon’s multi-billion-dollar push for autonomy is a clear mandate: the next generation of unmanned systems must be built for the reality of contested environments, not just the test track. Whether a platform is designed for reconnaissance, exploration, or combat, it must operate predictably from -55°C to +125°C (and up to +175°C) while under constant electronic or radioactive stress.

By prioritizing silicon-level radiation and thermal tolerance, VORAGO makes possible what was once unachievable: scaling mission-critical fleets that can survive anywhere on Earth. When mission success depends on navigating "parts unknown," we provide the inherent endurance required to survive the threat and achieve the mission.