Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Space electronics operate in an environment that demands the highest levels of reliability, radiation tolerance, and performance - under some of the harshest constraints on Size, Weight & Power (SWaP). Yet system designers are consistently faced with a painful choice: use off-the-shelf terrestrial chips that aren’t built for the mission, or rely on space-rated parts that are expensive, obsolete, and lacking performance.
At SPHERICAL, we’re solving this problem by collapsing the gap between chips and systems. We build high-reliability, high-performance space systems by designing our own mission-specific chips - enabled by open-source tools and a modern, software-first methodology. This approach lets us deliver systems that are not only more capable but radically more flexible, auditable, and scalable.
This talk will walk through our design philosophy, the tool flows we’ve developed and adapted, and how we’re leveraging the open-source silicon ecosystem to deliver 10x improvements in performance, reliability, and configurability. We’ll close by reflecting on the opportunities and missing pieces for the open-source community to power the next generation of critical systems.
Space electronics operate in an environment that demands the highest levels of reliability, radiation tolerance, and performance - under some of the harshest constraints on Size, Weight & Power (SWaP). Yet system designers are consistently faced with a painful choice: use off-the-shelf terrestrial chips that aren’t built for the mission, or rely on space-rated parts that are expensive, obsolete, and lacking performance.
At SPHERICAL, we’re solving this problem by collapsing the gap between chips and systems. We build high-reliability, high-performance space systems by designing our own mission-specific chips - enabled by open-source tools and a modern, software-first methodology. This approach lets us deliver systems that are not only more capable but radically more flexible, auditable, and scalable.
This talk will walk through our design philosophy, the tool flows we’ve developed and adapted, and how we’re leveraging the open-source silicon ecosystem to deliver 10x improvements in performance, reliability, and configurability. We’ll close by reflecting on the opportunities and missing pieces for the open-source community to power the next generation of critical systems.
