One rad hard environment is detectors at particle accelerators&#x2F;colliders. There are at least two problems:<p>1) You&#x27;d need a <i>lot</i> of lead to totally shield the equipment, like meters thick. Of course partial shielding reduces the radiation load but unless you can lower it to a negligible amount, you still need to have radiation tolerant code.<p>2) We generally want to minimize the amount of material in a particle detector, especially at layers nearest the collisions (where radiation is most intense). These inner layers (called trackers) are used to track light charged particles, while the outer layers (called calorimeters) are used to absorb and measure energy. So we need less material throughout to ensure we get good energy measurements by the time particles get to the calorimeter.<p>In addition to using radiation hardened components, a lot of this is mitigated by doing as little computation as possible on the front-end readout electronics. Most of it is switched capacitor arrays, asics, and the occasional FPGA, which can be made fairly reliable since they&#x27;re basically just responding to clock signals and measuring voltage (or something), and buffering these measurements. The raw data is then piped away from the detector at absurd bitrates to another part of the cavern (called the &quot;counting room&quot;) that is much less radioactive and has lots of standard computers&#x2F;electronics to do further processing.