Newport Beach-based Jazz Semiconductor and Rancho Palos Verdes-based ADSANTEC, a fabless semiconductor design firm, said today that the companies have been selected by NASA for designing a SERDES ASIC. The firms said that the high speed chip--which is used for high speed communications--will use Jazz's SiGe BiCMOS process and radiation hardened libraries from Jazz. Financial details of the win for the firms was not disclosed. The chip will be used as part of NASA's Lunar Atmosphere Dust Environment Explorer (LADEE) mission, expected to launch on May 1, 2012.