BAE Systems received $16 million in Defense Production Act Title III funding on July 2, 2026, to demonstrate and qualify its RH45 radiation-hardened 45 nanometre semiconductor technology, with manufacturing centered on GlobalFoundries’ 45nm silicon-on-insulator process in Malta, New York. The project reestablishes the RH45 ASIC Storefront, a qualified platform of standard building blocks and design tools for custom integrated circuits, and BAE says the technology will be integrated into single-board computers such as its Endura SBC.
For the Lunar Ark, the critical issue is not novelty but continuity: radiation-hardened electronics are a hard dependency for surface habitats, rovers, power distribution, guidance, communications, and archival systems exposed to cosmic rays and solar particle events. A restored RH45 supply chain reduces the chance that future lunar systems will need full redesigns and requalification when a chip line disappears, and it improves access to trusted, lower-risk computing hardware for missions that must last decades.
The Ark team should track whether RH45 qualification completes on schedule, whether production remains tied to a single foundry node, and whether Endura-class SBCs or equivalent modules become available through multiple vendors. Priority research: benchmark RH45 against other rad-hard nodes for power, performance, and lifetime dose tolerance; map which Ark subsystems could standardize on this class of electronics; and identify any single-point supply risks in GlobalFoundries, BAE, and downstream board integration.