Madrid – CDTI Board has recently decided to award a financial support to the Research and Development Project “PRODIGE PATHFINDER”, through the granting of a partially reimbursable loan up to 715801 euro, over the 1193400 euro total budget of the project.

Space sector and, in particular, satellite equipment market is one of the environments with the most promising prospects in the actual world scenario. It is expected a growth in the demand of all sectors of application, both in telecommunications and in earth observation or navigation. In this context, space telecommunications market is immersed in a process of accelerating change in which both traditional operators and new players are planning the provision of new services in a new scenario of competition and price reduction. Thales Alenia Space in Spain is seeking to maintain its leading position in the market of regenerative payloads for telecommunication satellites.

In order to keep the current leadership position, Thales Alenia Space in Spain has put in place a development plan for a high-performance OnBoard Processor (OBP) for mega-constellations in response to the huge increase in the telecommunication satellites constellations that are foreseen for the next years. This new product poses a number of technical and programmatic challenges that require a risk mitigation phase with the corresponding validation of technologies and key designs that ensure the final success of the program.

Being mega-constellations the main application of the product under development, its performances will be optimized to cover the following characteristics:

• Capability for different waveforms in the different links
• Capability for inter-satellite links
• Extensive routing abilities among all links
• Reconfiguration capability to adapt to evolutions in the constellation
• Low mass and low consumption

This new product is proposed to increase by two orders of magnitude the processing capacity of the 144Mbps of the current product (REDSat) up to 44GBps, therefore reducing costs and consumption per MHz processed. To reach this goal, it is necessary to carry out some development and risk reduction activities on the following technologies:

• New system modular architecture 
• Optical high-speed links between modules
• New 28nm and 22nm ASICs for digital RF front ends
• New manufacturing processes based on the Industry 4.0 paradigm
• Spatialization of new commercial routers
• New efficient waveforms and their associated modulation/demodulation algorithms
• New manufacturing and testing techniques (AIT)
• New thermal design techniques

The performances evolution of the new product compared to the current OBP product is detailed in the following table.

Parameter	Current OBP	New OBP	DELTA
Bandwidth	144 MHz	44 GHz	x305
Ports	4	40	x10
Standard Uplink	DVB-RCS	DVB-RCS2 & DVB-S2X
Standard Downlink	DVB-S2	DVB-S2X
Optical Intersatellite Links	No	40 Gbps	New
Frequency band	L	Ka
Users	5000	100000	x20
ASICs technology	350nm & 180nm	28nm & 22nm	x12.5 & x8
Interconnection	Motherboard	Optical links HSSL
Mass	25 kg	83 kg	x3
Consumption	200 W	845 W	x4
Volume size	83 l	120 l	x1.5

 

The financial support awarded to this project is locally managed by CDTI, under the Contract Number IDI-20190297.