Innovating with Scott Amyx: Interview with Bernd Lienhard, CEO of VORAGO Technologies

Thank you, Scott. Thanks for having me.

In a nutshell, we are providing radiation hardening solutions for aerospace and defense. And my first touch point, which actually made this opportunity so exciting, was actually my initial first three years as an engineer. So my first three years was really working as an engineer doing electronic work for the defense industry. And I can tell you, I think the most frustrating part for me was when, as an engineer, you have a task to do and you have a system to deliver, and the choices I had at that point in time because it was defense, they were so limited. The components you could use, the selections you had, delivery times, service, whatever. So I was actually at a point where I was after two, three years extremely frustrated. And interestingly enough, after almost 25 years, it came back full circle, and now running a company which is actually trying to solve that issue for this industry. So it's pretty cool actually coming full circle here.

So the company, being founded in 2004, actually had developed a technology platform. You said it's HotSeal, Scott. And HotSeal itself has actually two personalities. One goes really right into the middle of radiation hardening. The second one is actually a mechanism to allow semiconductors to still work and operate in extremely high temperature environments. And that's using standard off-the-shelf, standard CMOS technology like you find for example in your smartphone. And so the classical example for this obviously is oil and gas, where we've been having customers who are actually using our products in well management or in drilling equipment. So the technology has really both flavors and personalities. You can use it in either radiation hardening or you can use it in high temperature applications. It's pretty amazing actually.

If you think about going back over the last, I would say the last probably about five to ten years, and look what companies like SpaceX have done, Blue Origin and others have done, really getting to a point where space exploration and providing space-based systems gets a lot more affordable, has actually fueled the need for a lot more computing power and a lot more electronics actually in space. And that has a couple of factors. Number one, obviously we're replacing currently our existing Earth observation systems. We talk about climate change in a little bit. Second is intelligence gathering, threat prevention. And then obviously everybody talks about deep space exploration, and obviously going to Luna and going to Mars. So if you think about the ideas, getting a lot more cost-competitive systems to allow the deployment of electronics in space, whether it's in orbit or outside our orbit, has really fueled whatever they're doing over the last two, three, four, five years really.

Yeah, let's go back a little bit and take one step back before we really talk about our specific product. But think about everything which we currently design and use terrestrially or even in the air is basically on commercial use and commercial design and commercially produced semiconductor-based electronics. And because of Earth's atmosphere and the magnetic fields, we are in a very fortunate situation that the last two prevents any kind of radiation due to harm to this electronics, so it's totally fine to standard produce semiconductor components and put it into terrestrial systems. But by the time you expose the same kind of components in a radiation environment which you see in low orbit or even higher orbits or even more if you go into further out like Luna or Mars or deep space, the more radiation exposure you have and radiation does extremely harm to electronics, primarily to the components itself. That typically leads to either malfunction, loss of data, or complete destruction of it. So what's not possible is you can't just use extended design components and manufacture components and believe they're going to survive and be robust enough in that environment. So what we have done over the last 15 years plus, we have developed a technology platform and produced products on that platform which have the capability to survive that kind of environment, but still are based on the latest technology platforms. So basically using the same methodologies you would use terrestrially, but hardened enough to survive an environment in low orbit space or anywhere else outside the Earth's atmosphere.

So the lower temperature in most of the cases are not as critical for semiconductor. Higher temperature, think about the way I'm looking at a semiconductor has really two components. Number one is its functionality and its performance obviously, which is packed, but every single cut the way it's been manufactured comes with what we call parasitics. So these are basically side effects in a semiconductor which are there but you really don't want to have them. And the problem is these parasitics they get extremely annoying to a point they can malfunction a part or destroy a part by the time you actually put physical stress on these components, and that could be either through temperature, and typically higher temperature are triggering more of these parasitics, or you go on the other side and obviously do radiation as well. So typically in the semiconductor space, the lower temperatures are not as critical as the higher temperatures. So I think protecting a circuit or a component against higher temperature is typically a lot more difficult and requires a lot more different kind of approaches than typically for the lower temperature.

By the time you're going to prevent this, what I said before, these parasitics really to become active, you just pretty much avoid any additional mechanical or thermal kind of additions to protect or heat or cool the part itself. So your total energy consumption of the system comes down because the component itself is capable of withstanding both the heat as well as the lower temperature side. You just avoid using that kind of additional capability at all because the component itself can survive it.

Yes, and you always have to look at the total cost of ownership. So look at the power consumption of the entire satellite. If the components underneath it are able to sustain the temperature profiles on hot and cold, you can basically prevent them from having additional heating or cooling, or even shielding in most of the cases, because obviously your radiation could be avoided in some cases heavy shielding as well, which can be another element of cost and weight as well.

So for most of the CubeSats out there, which currently been used to some degree in the low orbit area, typically the traditional technologies which are currently available, which are expensive like FinFETs, are totally applicable. What we've seen a lot more in the last one or two years, by the time we've seen missions where they've primarily used CubeSats in the past, a lot of them has moved over a little bit more to the conservative side and complementing that CubeSat with radiation-hardened parts partially to protect very critical components of the mission or operating specific watchdog systems to supervise the CubeSats as well. And in all of them, whether it's the radiation-hardened part or the CubeSat, the technology can range from 180 nanometers down to 28 nanometers, so it's a relatively broad breadth. But we've seen that as a development in this industry that the industry has gone from COTS only now to a little bit what I call a hybrid concept, because even in mission lengths of two to three years, you have definitely impact and events which can differ on your entire system.

companies have believed like in the past they can run everything over two, three years with just going to the learning curve and realizing over an upgrade on their capabilities in terms of radiation hardening is actually good life insurance for the capability of the execution of the mission itself. And obviously by the time you get further out and radiation becomes a lot more dominant, we have seen that the usage of more advanced semiconductor nodes gets less and less likely because it's a lot more expensive and it's more difficult to harden on smaller technology nodes against radiation because it requires completely different approaches other than our own currently. So think about everything in the LEO space is still mixed and can really range across the technology platforms. The further you move out, the less likely it is you're going to see something like a FinFET technology or lower technology platforms. They're more the exception than the norm.

So LEO, definitely as the name says, it's really a low orbit. And the defining fact of that orbit is the exposure to radiation is existing, but it's not as strong because you still have the effect of the Earth's magnetic field which is going to protect the electronics partially from some of the space-based radiation. The further you move out, Scott, the more you're going to get exposed. Obviously that goes even out by the time you go to Luna, to Mars, to GEO, interplanetary kind of exposure. So there is an increasing rate of potential harm by the time you leave the low orbit. We've seen a lot more low orbit deployment as you said before through constellations and small sats. A lot of them either for intelligence gathering, insurance-based systems, Earth observation, climate control. And the further you go out, you add other elements like for example communication, as well as defense-related activities.

So that's such an excellent question. So one of our prime benefits of our technology platform is the capability to deploy that technology in existing semiconductor nodes as well as into the most sophisticated ones down to FinFET. So with that platform, you actually allow existing systems which are commercially used and non-radiation resistant to become radiation hardened and hence available for missions like this down the road. With the classical approach, it's a lot more legwork because you have to specifically design a component for that environment or you have to manufacture it in an environment which is very expensive and time-consuming. So our technology sits right at the sweet spot where you can basically use existing designs designed for terrestrial applications with little to no effort and upgrade them to higher performing radiation-resistant systems. So basically what you can do with that approach is you can replicate pretty much every application on Earth and make that available in an environment which is heavily exposed to radiation. So that basically allows you a fantastic bridge over to the next generation.

I think the biggest lesson learned is really underestimating a little bit on how a disruptive technology, even it's proven out, will take time to really find its way into new missions. I think this industry is still, because it's decades old with the same methodologies and way to do things, and mission success because missions are so critical, because it also has human lives at stake, are extremely conservative when it comes to choice of technology and new technology, more disruptive technologies. So when I set off and saw the capability of that technology and the products we bring into the market, I really believed we can disrupt that market a lot faster than we actually do. And we're doing great and we're growing pretty much doubling every year, but I would have said a couple of years ago that would have gone faster. But it's clearly this industry remains extremely conservative. And I think companies like SpaceX have definitely paved the way to make this more commonly used. But for us, my learning was definitely I would have thought we're going to be in a little bit of a different timeline here.