If disaster strikes and you’re tasked with clearing up some radioactive ruins, hardy robots are far better suited for the task than fleshy, fallible humans. However, communicating with these machines in irradiated environments is tricky because their chips can be “frazzled” by the relentless bombardment of ionizing radiation.
To overcome this problem, researchers at the Institute of Science Tokyo in Japan have developed a radiation-resistant WiFi chip. The specialized receiver can withstand radiation doses of up to 500 kilograys (kGy) while still performing at a reasonably good level.
Not only could this prove invaluable for wireless robots and drones deployed in cleanup operations following a meltdown, such as the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident, but it could also aid in the decommissioning of nuclear power reactors.
“Such tolerance addresses the requirements of nuclear power plant decommissioning, which involves exposure to intense gamma radiation emitted from fuel debris,” associate professor Atsushi Shirane, an electrical engineer at the Institute of Science Tokyo, said in a statement. “Introducing such a wireless system eliminates the need for complex cabling and enables efficient and seamless operation of a large number of robots,”
“By realizing Wi-Fi chips that operate stably even under ultra-high-dose radiation environments, wireless remote operation using robots and drones will be promoted, enabling reductions in worker radiation exposure risk and advances in work sophistication,” added Shirane.
When electronic chips are blasted with intense gamma radiation, charges become trapped in the transistors’ insulating layers, resulting in electrical leakage, signal loss, and noise. Over time, with enough radiation, the chip will degrade and eventually break.
The team countered this complication by reducing the number of transistors in the chip, minimizing the points vulnerable to radiation-induced damage. The remaining transistors were also physically enlarged to reduce the number of parallel segments, known as fingers, and edges where this damage could accumulate.
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The specialized chip is equipped with a radio-frequency amplifier to boost weak incoming signals; if you occasionally struggle to get WiFi in your home, imagine trying to get a signal in the depths of a nuclear power plant during an emergency.
However, the amplifier can be another weak point in these extreme environments because of its radiation-sensitive P-type metal–oxide–semiconductor transistor. This hurdle was overcome by swapping it out for an inductor, a passive component far less susceptible to radiation damage.
All of these small changes added up. In a series of tests, the chip was zapped with 500 kGy of radiation, but its performance was only slightly hampered. Its signal gain decreased by only 1.4 decibels, its noise figure increased by 1.26 decibels, and its power consumption decreased slightly by about 2 milliwatts. Despite these modest dips, the radiation-wracked receiver could still function at a level similar to a standard commercial Wi-Fi receiver in an everyday environment.
The demand for radiation-resistant chips is likely to grow in the decades ahead. Rest assured, we’re not talking about nuclear catastrophes, which are incredibly rare and somewhat unpredictable. The researchers note that nearly half of the 423 nuclear power reactors currently operating around the world are expected to enter decommissioning by 2050, and robots and drones will play a significant role in that work.
As for whether these chips might help robots in the event of a nuclear war, that’s probably a thought best left for another day…
The project was presented at the 2026 IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference, held in San Francisco between February 15 and 19, 2026.
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