Applications
In addition to standard CMOS technology, the 1802 was also available fabricated in Silicon on Sapphire semiconductor process technology, which gives it a degree of resistance to radiation and electrostatic discharge (ESD). Along with its extreme low-power abilities, this makes the chip well-suited in space applications (also, at the time the 1802 was introduced, very few, if any, other radiation-hardened microprocessors were available in the market).
The Galileo spacecraft used multiple 1802 microprocessors. The 1802 has often been incorrectly claimed to have been used in the earlier Viking and Voyager spacecraft, but it was not available at the time those spacecraft were being designed, and primary sources describe the Viking and Voyager computers as having architectures very dissimilar to the 1802, and not being microprocessor-based. The 1802 has been widely used in Earth-orbiting satellites mainly for their primary computer but since the 1990s its use as a low complexity flight control and telecom systems computer has dominated.
A number of early microcomputers were based on the 1802, including the Comx-35, COSMAC ELF (1976), COSMAC VIP, Netronics ELF II, Quest SuperELF, Finnish Telmac 1800 and Oscom Nano, and Yugoslav Pecom 32 and 64, as well as the RCA Studio II video game console (one of the first consoles to use bitmapped graphics).
The first high-level language available for the 1802 was Forth, provided by Forth, Inc. in 1976.
Read more about this topic: RCA 1802