HIGH PERFORMANCE SURFACE ACOUSTIC WAVE FILTERS (ARTES 5.1 5C.264)

Description

To develop and demonstrate high performance IF Surface Acoustic Wave Filter technology based on novel design techniques.

Targeted Improvements:

Significant (70%-90%) footprint reduction compared to conventional RF line-up filters.

Description:

The trend towards size reduction of the RF line-up of frequency converters has reached now a point where the largest part of the footprint is related to filtering specially when the converter operates at lower frequencies or when it is based on IF filtering which is mostly implemented in L/S-band.

Filters based on surface acoustic wave (SAW) technology have been successfully demonstrated, and thousands of devices are implemented on-board telecommunication satellites. SAW filters based on conventional topologies provide sharp and good rejection but suffer from fairly high insertion losses. Other SAW topologies provide lower insertion losses at the cost of slightly reduced sharpness and rejection. In any case SAW filters are considerably smaller than traditional cavity filters but are restricted to below roughly 2GHz as above, the filter steepness and performance is dramatically affected due to quality factor degradation.

This limitation could be overcome using non-standard filter synthesis techniques such as lossy filter synthesis or adaptive pre-distortion techniques which have been supported in previous ESA activities. These methods provide high performance filters (flat in-band response and sharp selectivity) albeit low quality factor resonators but at the expense of an increase of the insertion losses, which is not critical given the position of the IF filters within the frequency converters.

In this activity two BBs at S-band with two different relative bandwidth (one narrowband and one wideband) shall be developed.

The work logic shall be:

1. Assessment of state of art design techniques and identification of new SAW synthesis concepts,

2. Development of a new SAW design technique,

3. Filters design and manufacturing,

4. Testing of the filter BBs.

Procurement Policy: C(1) = Activity restricted to non-prime contractors (incl. SMEs). For additional information please go to EMITS news "Industrial Policy measures for non-primes, SMEs and R&D entities in ESA programmes".

Tender Specifics