Radiation detectors built in high-voltage and high-resistivity CMOS technology are an interesting option for the large area pixel trackers sought for the upgrade of the Large Hadron Collider experiments. A possible architecture is a hybrid design, where CMOS sensors are readout by front-end electronics coupled through a thin dielectric layer. A critical requirement is the radiation hardness of both the sensor and the front-end circuitry, up to a total dose ranging from 100 Mrad to 1 Grad (1 MGy to 10 MGy), depending on the distance from the interaction region. This paper explores the suitability of the BCD8 technology provided by STMicroelectronics for the construction of radiation-hard pixel detectors together with a technique to achieve reliability and repeatability of the hybridization process between the detector and the readout chip.