n/a

Background and justification:

Distributed optical fibre sensors (DOFS) are highly suitable for monitoring temperature, vibration and strain using physical principles such as Raman, Rayleigh and Brillouin backscatter. They convert a standard telecom infrastructure to a sensor network providing thousands of virtual sensors per km using the intrinsic light/glass interaction during propagation.

GaN-based devices are becoming a key technology for millimeter-wave applications. Because of outstanding material properties, recent advances in GaN device designs provided a sharp increase in performances including high power, high efficiency, reliability, linearity, and compact size. These capabilities are ideally suited for numerous millimeter-wave power applications such as wireless networks and PAs MMIC for Q-band frequency and beyond.

The main objective of the intelligent COTS-based Power Stages (iCOTS) project consisted of the following aspects:

• Design and implementation of a BLDC power stage for robotic space application
• A modular design for the evaluation of power electronics in robotic space application based on COTS GaN-FETs
• Definition of the design process and the appropriate selection of COTS components
• Radiation test of selected COTS components

The goal of the Powersail project is to demonstrate the potential of amorphous silicon (a-Si) deposited on ultralight space-grade polyimide for solar power satellites (SPS). State of the art solutions are III-V compound semiconductor triple junction-based PV modules, which are 100 times too expensive and one order of magnitude too heavy to build a competitive SPS with terrestrial microwave energy collection infrastructure.