Duration: 18 months
Next generation high throughput telecommunication payloads, specifically those employing digital beam forming antennas, have very demanding requirements in terms of data communication speed, signal conversion. Targeted are signal Ka-band communication signal conversion and transmission speeds of 112Gbps at the lowest feasible power consumption. The latter is imposed by the large number of antenna elements present in digital beam forming antennas. These stringent power consumption requirements can not be met with the more mature Fully Depleted Silicon on Insulator (FDSOI) 28/22nm technology and require the advanced FinFET technology (7nm or lower) which is now available. Modern low-power 112Gbps high speed serial link contain the electrical transceiver as well as, included within it, the low-power analog to digital and digital to analog conversion circuits. The latter could meet the demands for future transceiver and conversion circuits for digital beam forming payloads for space. With the detailed characterisation of the signal transmission and conversion performances, the potential benefits of adopting them for digital beam forming architectures can be confirmed.
