2021, Giannakopoulos, Stavros, Sourikopoulos, Ilias, Stampoulidis, Leontios, Ostrovskyy, Pylyp, Teply, Florian, Tittelbach-Helmrich, K., Panic, Goran, Fischer, Gunter, Grabowski, Alexander, Zirath, Herbert, Ayzac, Philippe, Venet, Norbert, Maho, Anaëlle, Sotom, Michel, Jones, Shaun, Wood, Grahame, Oxtoby, Ian

We report the design of a 112 Gb/s radiation-hardened (RH) optical transceiver applicable to intra-satellite optical interconnects. The transceiver chipset comprises a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) driver and transimpedance amplifier (TIA) integrated circuits (ICs) with four channels per die, which are adapted for a flip-chip assembly into a mid-board optics (MBO) optical transceiver module. The ICs are designed in the IHP 130 nm SiGe BiCMOS process (SG13RH) leveraging proven robustness in radiation environments and high-speed performance featuring bipolar transistors (HBTs) with fT/fMAX values of up to 250/340 GHz. Besides hardening by technology, radiation-hardened-by-design (RHBD) components are used, including enclosed layout transistors (ELTs) and digital logic cells. We report design features of the ICs and the module, and provide performance data from post-layout simulations. We present radiation evaluation data on analog devices and digital cells, which indicate that the transceiver ICs will reliably operate at typical total ionizing dose (TID) levels and single event latch-up thresholds found in geostationary satellites.

2019, Hassan, Emadeldeen, Martynenko, Denys, Wadbro, Eddie, Fischer, Gunter, Berggren, Martin

This paper proposes novel low-profile differential-fed planar antennas with embedded sharp frequency selectively. The antennas are compact and easy to integrate with differential devices without matching baluns. The antenna design is formulated as a topology optimization problem, where requirements on impedance bandwidth, directivity, and filtering are used as the design objectives. The optimized antennas operate over the frequency band 6.0-8.5 GHz. The antennas have reflection coefficients below -15 dB, cross-polarization levels below -42 dB, a maximum gain of 6.0 ± 0.5 dB, and a uniform directivity over more than 130° beamwidth angle in the frequency band of interest. In addition, the antennas exhibit sharp roll-off between the operational band and frequencies around the 5.8GHz WiFi band and the 10 GHz X-band. One antenna has been fabricated with a good match between simulation and measurement results. © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.