Well, a semiconductor company can design a general purpose processor and sell millions or billions of units. Or, it can design a safety critical and rad-hard c

Well, a semiconductor company can design a general purpose processor and sell millions or billions of units. Or, it can design a safety critical and rad-hard chip and sell you maybe a couple thousand? :-) At least, there is now the option to get defense-grade FPGAs and throw some radiation hardening techniques (triple-modular-redundancy, scrubbing, etc) on it.