What begins as an ambition to manufacture microchips often evolves when founders encounter the harsh realities of an emerging domestic supply chain. For Christopher Elash and Lars Kishchuk, engineering graduates from the University of Saskatchewan and alumni of university-led space initiatives like the province’s pioneering satellite project, the original blueprint was simple: they wanted to build chips. However, deep conversations with stakeholders across Canada’s burgeoning semiconductor industry quickly revealed a far more pressing, underserved opportunity. Rather than adding another voice to the crowded field of chip fabrication, the duo identified a gaping hole in Canada’s technological ecosystem, leading directly to the birth of their Saskatoon-based startup, Novigrad.
The epiphany arrived as Elash and Kishchuk spoke with companies developing sophisticated electronics for outer space and other extreme environments. They discovered a universal frustration that united nearly every sector player: radiation qualification and testing. Essential for ensuring that electronic systems survive the punishing conditions of orbit or high-altitude operations, this testing process was consistently described as exceptionally costly, painfully time-consuming, and frustratingly reliant on facilities located outside of Canada.
“We should make chips; everyone loves making chips,” Elash recounted during an interview with EE Times. Yet, as he listened to industry peers, a recurring narrative emerged. Companies repeatedly told him that conducting radiation testing was “just awful” and that these logistical bottlenecks were routinely throwing development schedules off track.
Simultaneously, the founders uncovered a vibrant, highly active Canadian space sector that far exceeded their initial expectations. Organizations throughout the country were working on everything from advanced communications hardware and heavy-duty power electronics to sophisticated memory devices and high-performance processing systems. All of them were desperately seeking domestic support for radiation testing and component qualification.
Historically, many of these domestic players had relied on providers based in the United States to clear regulatory and operational hurdles. But Novigrad quickly realized that the sheer volume of domestic demand was more than enough to sustain a thriving enterprise right at home. “We knew that there was a bit of a market here,” Kishchuk noted, reflecting on the steady cadence of inquiries. “Every week or two, we get reached out to by a different entity in Canada.”
The breadth of hardware passing through Novigrad’s pipeline underscores the diverse nature of modern aerospace and defense engineering. Memory components—including SRAM, DRAM, and flash storage—remain frequent candidates for rigorous testing, particularly as a new wave of commercial space enterprises rushes to qualify commercial off-the-shelf components for orbital missions. Yet, Novigrad’s founders emphasize that no single device category dominates their workload. Projects can span power distribution systems, high-speed signal processing hardware, communications electronics, or highly specialized custom integrated circuits.
“That’s the fun part,” Elash said, describing the dynamic technological landscape. “There isn’t really any common device.” The startup routinely evaluates everything from power amplifiers and advanced memory modules to complex processing and communications electronics, adapting its testing protocols to fit the unique vulnerabilities of each component.
During a recent webinar hosted by Canada’s Semiconductor Council, Elash elaborated on the industry-wide push to leverage commercial off-the-shelf components in space missions. While these mass-produced components offer massive performance and cost advantages over traditional, custom radiation-hardened silicon, they come with a catch: organizations must have absolute confidence that these devices can withstand severe radiation exposure without failing mid-mission.
A primary focus of Novigrad’s daily operations involves screening for radiation-induced failures, with a particular emphasis on single-event effects. These insidious phenomena occur when individual high-energy particles strike a semiconductor device, triggering temporary or permanent faults such as sudden bit flips, unpredictable voltage transients, or catastrophic software crashes. “This is the concern that keeps people up at night,” Elash explained, highlighting why aerospace engineers approach unshielded silicon with profound caution.
Beyond sudden particle strikes, Novigrad also evaluates cumulative radiation damage resulting from prolonged exposure in space. Utilizing cobalt-60 gamma sources, the company’s engineers meticulously assess how devices degrade over extended periods. This testing tracks critical performance metrics, including rising leakage currents, diminished processing speeds, and subtle shifts in operating characteristics that could compromise a multi-year mission.
To accurately recreate the punishing realities of low-Earth orbit and deep space, Novigrad employs a combination of specialized radiation chambers, advanced laser-based systems, and particle accelerator facilities. “We recreate the environment that it’d be operating in, in some sort of accelerated and controlled setting on the ground,” Elash said. The empirical data gathered from these runs is subsequently transformed into actionable engineering recommendations, giving customers a transparent, high-confidence picture of device reliability long before hardware is integrated into a rocket payload.
While space applications remain the primary engine of Novigrad’s business growth, the startup is witnessing a notable uptick in interest from the defense sector and Arctic research initiatives. In these terrestrial domains, radiation effects are frequently underestimated. Electronics deployed in Earth’s northern latitudes encounter elevated levels of natural radiation because the planet’s magnetic field naturally funnels charged solar and cosmic particles toward the poles.
Kishchuk pointed out that as Ottawa ramps up strategic investments in northern surveillance, sovereignty preservation, and remote monitoring capabilities, deeply understanding the behavior of electronics in these high-latitude environments becomes an operational necessity.
To expand its testing capabilities and lower financial barriers for local developers, Novigrad is actively exploring partnerships with other prominent Canadian facilities. These include collaborations with the Saskatchewan Cyclotron Centre and investigations into advanced laser-based fault-injection systems developed at the university level. Such technologies could potentially serve as a cost-effective pre-screening alternative, allowing customers to iron out fundamental flaws before committing scarce, expensive particle accelerator beam time.
Canada already boasts a robust research infrastructure capable of supporting radiation testing and space-grade qualification, including the renowned testing capabilities of TRIUMF in British Columbia. Furthermore, the University of Saskatchewan in Novigrad’s home city hosts the Semiconductor Technology And Rad-Effects Research Lab, creating a localized talent pipeline and research hothouse.
Both founders share a firm belief that Canada possesses the intellectual capital and technical talent required to foster a resilient domestic radiation-effects ecosystem. “A few years ago, people thought they couldn’t do this work in Canada,” Elash observed. “Now they’re looking to come back home and bring all the experience and knowledge.”
As commercial enterprise and government space agencies alike accelerate the pace of satellite launches, the global demand for radiation-resilient semiconductors continues its upward trajectory. Every new satellite, scientific payload, and orbital computing node relies entirely on microelectronics capable of weathering cumulative radiation doses and single-event disruptions without sacrificing processing throughput or operational lifespan.
The broader semiconductor industry has increasingly reflected this urgent prioritization. Earlier in the year, NHanced Semiconductors announced it had selected Avalanche Technology’s magnetoresistive RAM for an advanced FPGA targeting demanding satellite and defense deployments, moving away from alternative memory options that failed to meet the strict reliability demands of radiation-hardened system-in-package designs. Similarly, Micron Technology expanded its footprint in the aerospace market by introducing a high-density, radiation-tolerant single-level cell NAND flash product boasting a 256-gigabit die capacity, marking the start of a broader portfolio aimed at space-qualified NAND, NOR, and DRAM solutions.
Meanwhile, high-reliability power devices from Infineon Technologies recently ventured into the cosmos aboard the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, and commercial space giants like SpaceX continue pushing toward orbital data center concepts that will fundamentally require sophisticated radiation mitigation strategies.
As these high-stakes cosmic and terrestrial frontiers expand, startups like Novigrad are finding that the journey of building a chip company can sometimes lead to an even more vital destination: ensuring that the rest of the industry’s technology survives the journey into the stars.
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