Renesas Electronics Corporation announced that its radiation-hardened (rad-hard) ICs are being used in NASA’s Artemis II mission, which launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on April 1. Artemis II is the first crewed mission around the moon in decades. Four astronauts are aboard the Orion spacecraft, traveling farther from Earth than any humans in over fifty years. The mission tests spacecraft systems and crew performance in the deep-space environment before returning to Earth. It validates key spacecraft capabilities ahead of future crewed lunar landings.
Renesas rad-hard ICs, under the Intersil brand, are integrated across multiple subsystems in the Artemis II core systems, including the Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) rocket. The devices are embedded in the space vehicle’s avionics and safety launch system. They support regulation and distribution of power, maintenance of signal integrity, and onboard computing. The ICs are designed to operate in environments with elevated radiation levels and extreme temperatures encountered in human space missions.
The Renesas Intersil brand has supplied products to the space industry for more than six decades, with involvement in virtually every satellite, shuttle launch, and deep-space exploration mission since the founding of Radiation in 1950. Renesas provides efficient, thermally-optimized, and highly-reliable SMD, MIL-STD-883, and MIL-PRF 38535 Class-V/Q Intersil-branded products for defense, high-reliability (Hi-Rel), and rad-hard space markets. These rad-hard ICs support subsystems for mission-critical applications in data communications transfer, power supplies and power conditioning, general protection circuitry, and telemetry, tracking and control (TT&C).
