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Learn more about IEEE - Join the world's largest professional organization devoted to engineering and applied sciences and get access to this e-book plus all of IEEE Spectrum's articles, archives, PDF downloads, and other benefits. Learn more about IEEE - CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN JOIN IEEESIGN IN Close Access Thousands of Articles -- Completely Free Create an account and get exclusive content and features: Save articles, download collections, and post comments -- all free! For full access and benefits, subscribe to Spectrum. CREATE AN ACCOUNTSIGN IN SemiconductorsRoboticsNewsTelecommunications Wi-Fi That Can Withstand a Nuclear Reactor Six months in a nuclear reactor? This receiver chip can take it Katherine Bourzac 02 Apr 2026 3 min read Katherine Bourzac is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco. Close-up of a receiver chip. "Bring on the radiation! I can take it," this Wi-Fi receiver chip would say if it could talk. Yasuto Narukiyo, Sena Kato, et al. Researchers have made a Wi-Fi receiver that's tough enough to work inside a nuclear reactor. They hope the receiver might be part of a wireless communications system for robotics used to decommission reactors. Yasuto Narukiyo, a graduate student at the Institute of Science Tokyo, presented the wireless receiver at the IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), in San Francisco in February. The receiver endured a total radiation dose of 500 kilograys, orders of magnitude higher than the doses typically tolerated by electronics in outer space. After the 2011 nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant, engineers began using robots to help characterize and clean up the site. Most of these require local area network (LAN) cables that can get tangled, says Narukiyo. His team, which includes his advisor Atsushi Shirane and Masaya Miyahara of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), is aiming to develop a wireless system for controlling robots in this harsh environment. Even under less dramatic circumstances, nuclear plants don't last forever, and they need to be safely dismantled and decontaminated so the sites can be reused, a process called decommissioning. The process is lengthy, and risks exposing people to radiation, which is why engineers hope robots can come to the rescue. The need for such robots is only growing. According to a 2024 study, of 204 reactors that have been closed, only 11 plants with a capacity over 100 megawatts have been fully decommissioned, and 200 more reactors will reach the end of their lifetimes in the next 20 years. While electronics for space exploration are typically required to endure radiation doses of 100 to 300 grays over three years, a robot operating in a nuclear reactor needs to endure more than 500 kGy over the course of six months, says Narukiyo--at least 1,000 times the dosage. A robotic arm made by KUKA was able to withstand just 164.55 Gy of damage before failing. For comparison, the lens of the eye absorbs just 60 milligrays during a CT scan of the brain. Radiation Hardening To "harden" the 2.4-gigahertz Wi-Fi receiver against intense levels of radiation, Narukiyo and his team changed its mix of components, minimized the total number of transistors, and tinkered with the geometry of the transistors that were left. The transistors, silicon MOSFETs (metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors), contain an oxide layer that's particularly vulnerable to radiation damage. Blasts of gamma rays can trap positive charges in the oxide, degrading the device's performance and causing errors. They also changed the design of the transistors themselves. The device's gate controls the flow of current through the transistor. The smaller it is, the more its performance will be degraded by a dose of radiation. So they made the gates longer and wider. A tabletop metal cylinder with a circuit board connected to power plugs on top of it. Researchers tested the Wi-Fi receiver by placing it on top of a radiation source.Yasuto Narukiyo, Sena Kato, et al. Secondly, they considered the differences in how radiation affects PMOS transistors, in which current is carried primarily by positive charges, and NMOS, where electrons flow. PMOS transistors are more vulnerable to radiation damage because positive charge gets trapped in both the oxide and at the interface between the oxide and the rest of the semiconductor. These add up and shift the transistor towards the off state, says Narukiyo. To compensate, the new receiver design minimizes the use of PMOS, replacing these transistors with other elements such as inductors that don't have an oxide layer. NMOS transistors are more resilient, says Narukiyo, because positive charges trapped in the oxide are to some extent canceled out by negative charges that get trapped at the interface. Narukiyo and his team measured the performance of the receiver before exposure to radiation, and again after blasting it with a total dose of 300 kGy and then 500 kGy. Before being irradiated, it showed comparable performance to typical Wi-Fi receivers. After reaching the highest radiation dose, the gain of the receiver had decreased by about 1.5 decibel. Narukiyo says the receiver is hardened enough, and now he hopes to improve its performance. He's also working on a transmitter, which would allow for two-way communications. This is more challenging due to the need to produce high levels of current to generate the Wi-Fi signal. He says an earlier version he tried was broken by a 300 kGy dose. The group is exploring using other semiconductors, such as diamond, to toughen the transmitter. From Your Site Articles * Fukushima Robot Operator Writes Tell-All Blog > * How a Robot Is Grabbing Fuel From a Fukushima Reactor > Related Articles Around the Web * ROBOTICS IN NUCLEAR APPLICATIONS REPORT 2021:796 NUCLEAR DIGITALIZATION IN > * IAEA Workshop Explores Role of Drones and Robotics for Nuclear Power Plant Operations > wi-finuclear reactorsissccdecommissioningindustrial robotsradiation hardening Katherine Bourzac Katherine Bourzac is a freelance journalist based in San Francisco, Calif. She writes about materials science, nanotechnology, energy, computing, and medicine--and about how all these fields overlap. Bourzac is a contributing editor at Technology Review and a contributor at Chemical & Engineering News; her work can also be found in Nature and Scientific American. She serves on the board of the Northern California chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. The Conversation (0) A young white man smiling and crossing his arms in a workshop. The InstituteIEEE Member NewsCareersProfile Temple University Student Highlights IEEE Membership Perks 3h 4 min read Illustration of several data servers interconnected across long distances. 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