Duration: 18 months
Recent interest in global space broadband has driven significant advancements in SATCOM technologies. Affordable arrays and beamforming chipsets are crucial for high-speed, low-latency coverage. However, multi-beam arrays need substantial complexity, while various SATCOM bands and ground/space applications require different chipsets. Recent ESA patent ESA-PAT-818 "Multi-Node Chip for Symmetric Beamforming" opens the door to reduced-complexity multi-beam SATCOM arrays.
This OSIP proposal focuses on symmetric beamformer ICs as a "universal beamforming unit" for full Ku-Ka Band (13-30 GHz) and seeks to commercialize ESA-PAT-818 patent. A conventional IQ beamformer consists of a 90° coupler, a power combiner, and I/Q VGAs for phase/amplitude generation. Processing M beams with N phased array elements thus requires M×N I/Q beamformers. Accessing both Ku/Ka bands often needs to double the I/Q beamformers. In contrast, leveraging ESA-PAT-818, the proposed symmetrical beamformer will use a transformer polyphase 90° hybrid to generate the IQ signals and a 180° hybrid to produce conjugated signals at the outputs (Δ and Σ) for two antennas over 13-30GHz. With two input beam signals (Beam-1 for input port, Beam-2 for isolation port), two pairs of conjugated signals are generated for two antennas with dual-beam, ideal for low-cost reduced-complexity multi-beam SATCOM arrays. Scalability to large arrays will also be explored.
The symmetrical beamformer will be implemented in GF 22FDX. 90°/180° couplers will explore self-similar folded transformer structures. Preliminary simulations show a 10-30GHz 90° hybrid coupler with 1dB min loss and 2.5° max phase error. The beamformer's simulated phase shifts cover 10/20/30 GHz with a max 1.5° RMS phase error. ETH is the prime (90k€) and ARGUS SPACE AG is the sub (85k€) for the 175k€ OSIP budget, with total 210k€ cost sharing (ETH: 80k€ GF22FDX tapeout + 20k€ Testing. ARGUS: 110k€ commercial Cadence license) and a two-stage development plan.
