Radiation-Tolerant Microcontrollers for Expanding LEO Satellite Network

[whooshing sound] So Bernd, can you start with a brief introduction to Virago as a company and the type of technology you develop and provide for satellites and other space applications?

Yes, Woodrow, and thanks, first of all, thanks for having me on this one.

I'm very excited to talk about the company and our technology.

So the way of, of, us to look at the company itself, so Virago Technologies is a leader in high-reliability semiconductors, and we provide solutions basically for extreme environments.

And we do make radiation-protected microcontrollers and microprocessors.

And when I say radiation-protected, we really have two different flavors.

One is re- radiation-hards for a lot of more extreme environments in different orbits.

And then obviously we do have one radiation-tolerant version for different orbits, primarily more of the, the LEO side of the world.

And obviously also that scales down to more terrestrial applications down the road as well.

So obviously our products are made really to secure the most, um, challenging missions, um, to save people, property, and our planetary e-ecosystem as well.

So primarily our, our target applications are satellites, um, sub-spatial subsystems, electronics, electronic systems, and onboard applications, obviously.

Right.

And last year, Virago made, uh, headlines when you, in November twenty twenty-five, introduced a new line of radiation-tolerant microcontrollers for low Earth orbit, and, uh, you had a focus on lowering the cost of space-grade radiation-tolerant microcontrollers.

So before we get into a little perspective and details on that, could you first explain to our audience who may be unfamiliar, what is a microcontroller, and what functionality does it provide for satellites and other spacecraft?

Yeah, that's a good question because microcontroller is probably not a very common term because most of the people are more used to the term microprocessor.

So a microcontroller is essentially a very small computer chip, so it runs software obviously.

It combines typically a processor core, and we use Arm in our systems, memory and interfaces, control functions, and basically bus interfaces.

And it's, in a satellite, a microcontroller typically manages power systems, sensors, could be a watchdog, thermal conditions, you know, basically coordinates communication between subsystems.

So when you think about a microcontroller, the prime purpose of this one is really to provide a intelligence in subsystems, which wasn't there before.

So that's basically what a, overall a microcontroller does.

Compared to a microprocessor, it's more the embedded function to control a subsystem than the raw, than raw compute power.

I see.