It’s super hard to get pricing info for radiation hardened chips that are currently being sold, let alone just buying one from Digi-Key. It’s pretty damn annoying if you just want the one super robust chip for a system supervisor or something else like that, to have no idea how to plan the design for a cost budget before you begin doing a lot of contact work talking to people for price quotes. It’s a weird ecosystem that feels surprising antiquated compared to the more modern parts of the embedded ecosystem that I’m familiar with.
Worst price I can remember off hand was $15 grand USD for a radiation hardened microcontroller, pretty sure it was an Arduino mega family chip I could have gotten the industrial quality version of for $25 bucks from Digi-Key… if I didn’t want it radiation hardened.
Can you even buy one without running afoul of ITAR?
I'm slightly surprised you could even buy a rad-hardened microcontroller, but maybe microcontrollers are considered simple enough that they are exempt?
I’m pretty sure the reason a lot of it is behind such gatekeeping and onerous sales process crap is because of ITAR. Dealing with American companies is the god damn worst for anything like this. So much so I’ll actively avoid anyone US based. I am building a satellite, and America has lots of cool space tech… but it’s globally second class compared with any other country since some of them give so little of a shit about arms control (they import their real weapons from countries like the USA, UK, etc and so any space tech is just so tiny a niche businesses they don’t care) that it’s more paperwork to get through customs upon arrival than it is to buy stuff like solar panels and other basic stuff from the USA due to ITAR.
Get that from the USA and your basically in for a polite colonoscopy before they even tell you their prices (only slightly exaggerating)
Most of the time, it's easy to just put a microcontroller core into an FPGA but sometimes you just need some basic operations and don't have a lot of power to spare for an FPGA you won't fully utilize. The Atmel chip is perfect for this situation, TI makes one too. It's not going to be good for a 15 year GEO mission but there's still a niche to fill with these parts.
