Modeling and Fabrication of a Reconfigurable RF Output Stage for Nanosatellite Communication Subsystems

Jose L Alvarez-Flores,Ramón Parra-Michel,Leonel Soriano-Equigua,Jorge Simón,Viktor I Rodriguez-Abdala,Joel A Castillo,Jorge Flores-Troncoso

doi:10.3390/electronics11010149

Jose L Alvarez-Flores, Ramón Parra-Michel + Show 5 more

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Current small satellite platforms such as CubeSats require robust and versatile communication subsystems that allow the reconfiguration of the critical operating parameters such as carrier frequency, transmission power, bandwidth, or filter roll-off factor. A reconfigurable Analog Back-End for the space segment of a satellite communication subsystem is presented in this work. This prototype is implemented on a 9.5 cm2 6-layer PCB, and it operates from 0.070 to 6 GHz and complies with CubeSat and IPC-2221 standards. The processing, control, and synchronizing stages are carried out on a Software-Defined Radio approach executed on a baseband processor. Results showed that the signal power at the output of the proposed Analog Back-End is suitable for feeding the following antenna subsystem. Furthermore, the emitted radiation levels by the transmission lines do not generate electromagnetic interference.

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Applying the new electronic communication technologies to spatial missions either for remote observation or surface exploration of the earth or other astronomical bodies promises the improvement of sustainability, robustness, and truthfulness of the current missions when sharing spatial resources [1]
The Reconfigurable Analog Back-End (RABE) design features two interfaces; the first one is a digital I/O data, control, and communication interface between the prototype and the System on a Chip (SoC), which is controlled by an Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), and which is part of the BBP; the connection interface with the radio frequency (RF) stage is achieved through an FMC connector; the second one is an RF analog output with an SMA connector as the interface to the RF filtering stages, power amplifier, and antenna
It was noted that RABE output power (Figure 9a) was reduced by 2 dB compared to FMCOMMS4 (Figure 9b), which was 7 dB

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Applying the new electronic communication technologies to spatial missions either for remote observation or surface exploration of the earth or other astronomical bodies promises the improvement of sustainability, robustness, and truthfulness of the current missions when sharing spatial resources [1]. This new paradigm requires diverse technologies to achieve a flexible reconfiguration capability between heterogeneous satellites. The embedded SDR technique used on a System on a Chip (SoC) turns out to be suitable to implement flexible, adaptable, and reconfigurable satellite communication systems and eliminates the need to implement hardware for each application. This technique allows reducing development time, costs, and system mass

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