Infineon’s radiation-hardened semiconductors were selected for NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, which is designed to operate for up to a decade at the Sun-Earth L2 point, more than 1.5 million km from Earth. The article says the integrated parts are rad-hard power devices qualified to MIL-PRF standards, with Total Ionizing Dose and Single Event Effects characterization, and that Infineon’s portfolio includes rad-hard silicon power MOSFETs, GaN transistors, gate drivers, solid-state relays, and diodes.
The core technical signal is that mission-critical power conversion is now being treated as a radiation-resilience problem, not only a shielding problem. For lunar habitation, this matters because Ark infrastructure will need electronics that tolerate cumulative radiation, particle strikes, thermal stress, and decade-scale service intervals without repair; high-reliability power semiconductors directly reduce the probability of cascading failure in power distribution, life support, communications, and thermal control.
Ark teams should track the maturation of MIL-PRF- and JANS-qualified rad-hard GaN and MOSFET supply chains, especially devices validated for TID and SEE performance. Priority work: benchmark these parts against lunar surface radiation profiles, test decentralized and modular power architectures inspired by NASA’s radiation-hardened converter ecosystem, and qualify vendors that can support long-life, high-reliability power systems for habitats, storage, and robotics.