Apogee Semiconductor

Apogee Semiconductor designs radiation-hardened integrated circuits for space and defense systems. It is based in Plano, Texas. Its parts handle power, analog and mixed-signal jobs in harsh environments.

The company says it is the only US-based high-reliability IC provider built for fault containment around commercial off-the-shelf parts. Its chips are not meant to replace every commercial part on a board. They act as a protective layer at key fault points. They detect, contain and stop errors before they spread through a system. This lets teams use low-cost commercial parts where it makes sense and still meet mission reliability needs.

Apogee says its components are designed from the silicon up for radiation, not screened after the fact. In head-to-head tests, its parts showed zero bit flips while commercial equivalents suffered hundreds of thousands of upsets. Its LEO and GEO variants share the same form, fit and function. Its Zero-Power-Penalty cold sparing removes current leakage in redundant parts.

The product range includes power switches, shift registers, latches, I/O expanders, level translators, buffers, transceivers and fault containment logic. The ARPS1020A5 and ARPS1050A5 are smart high-side power switches with protection, fault containment and health data. Flight-grade versions are available. Other parts include an 8-bit shift register, a dual quad-SR latch, a 16-bit I/O expander family, an 8-channel level translator with cold sparing and a dual 3-input majority voter. Products are sold through authorised distributors.

Apogee was founded in 2017 on the strength of a National Science Foundation grant. NASA picked it for the Tipping Point program in 2019. Its first product shipped in August 2021, and it reached 10,000 units in 2022. Its parts gained verified flight heritage in March 2023. It released a 300 krad total ionizing dose family in 2023 and earned ISO 9001 certification in April 2024. In 2026 it launched what it calls the smallest smart load switch family.

The company publishes its test data openly. It answers technical questions within 24 hours, and its engineers visit customers on site.

Services

• Radiation-hardened power switches
• Radiation-hardened shift registers and latches
• Radiation-hardened I/O expanders
• Level translators
• Fault containment logic
• Buffers and transceivers
• Cold sparing parts
• Engineering support