Duration: 12 months
This idea proposes to leverage the ESA Patent 705 to develop a generic building block for multibeam active antennas for LEO communication payloads. The building block leverages the triple ridge miniature waveguide horn developed by SWISSto12, whose radiation properties are believe to be the best in the state of the art, in a highly integrated architecture, which removes RF-critical interfaces by 3D printing the antenna element and the PCB housing together. This approach removes connectors that affect RF loss or drive overall antenna complexity, as well as dramatically simplify the construction of the complete active antenna. The building block (known as slice) is a linear (1D) active array creating multiple independent beams (8 as baseline, maximization of beams to be studied within the activity), which can be connected to other identical slices to for a 2D active antenna. This assembly of slices is done through a secondary beamforming network, which can be of different types (fully digital, hybrid, 2nd level passive, 2nd level analog), increasing the flexibility of the proposed concept. The goal of the project is to enable a product that is simple and that it enables a price reduction x3-x5 wrt what the large primes (Airbus, Thales Alenia Space) currently develop. The commercial opportunity is the feasibility of 5G NTN network. The project plan to implement this idea includes: 1) system specification consolidation, 2) system high-level design, 3) slice detailed design (including both passive part and active part), 4) slice breadboarding and test, and 5) product commercialization roadmap.
