Photonic Beamforming for EO and Telecom Applications

In the recent years, thanks to possibilities opened up by the advancement of space technology, novel satellite architectures have been defined to shift the system complexity from the ground segment to on-board the satellite. One of the equipment that enables a high flexibility in the satellite, enhancing its ability to be reconfigured, is the beamforming function. A specific type of beamformer is the True-Time Delay (TTD) whose characteristic allows increasing the instantaneous bandwidth and FoV of the equipment allowing to support high data rate or high resolution applications. Within the RETINA program, the team lead by DAS Photonics with Airbus Italia, AMO, UPV and UKRI developed a reconfigurable multibeam photonic beamformer with centralised processing supporting a very innovative SAR approach based on photonic technologies. The BFN is based on an optimized PIC in silicon-nitride technology implementing designs of TTD beamforming network, suitable for broadband applications without beam-squint degradation and compatible with large antennas requirements. The flat Array Antenna is based on PCB technology with sub-array BFN integrated in the PCB. A breadboard of the Antenna System was developed and tested, and resulting performances show the ability of the system to fully support future EO SAR and Telecom systems.