Anokiwave integrated circuits (ICs) and Ball Aerospace are enabling affordable flat panel phased array antennas that meet regulatory requirements, function over full scan volume, and are thermally operational in hot environments.

April 28, 2020 | San Diego, CA: Anokiwave and Ball Aerospace have announced a collaboration to develop and enable the next generation of SATCOM terminal solutions. As part of this collaboration Anokiwave’s advanced, low-cost silicon 2nd generation SATCOM K/Ka-band ICs power the Ball Aerospace fully electronically steerable K/Ka-band antennas that feature no moving parts, providing long-term reliability with low-cost manufacturing.

Ball Aerospace brings an innovative approach to flat panel electronically steered antennas with flexible, cost efficient subarrays that can be tiled together to form an antenna that is customized to meet the end user’s needs. This approach allows the flexibility to optimize a terminal to the mission needs of the customer without the cost of antenna re-design. Anokiwave provides Silicon SATCOM beamforming ICs that improve performance, reduce cost, simplify thermal management, and provide a host of unique digital functionality to simplify overall system design. Compared to multiple other companies that are just beginning to promise their early stage ICs, Anokiwave ICs are fully released and are shipping in volume.

“With our latest generation of SATCOM ICs, Anokiwave has improved the performance and reduced the cost to a point where Ball Aerospace can now deliver flat panel electronically steered antennas that meet cost and performance targets,” said Abhishek Kapoor, Anokiwave vice president of Sales. “This is a unique first in the industry as many companies have been working on solutions with promises made and broken, expectations set and not fulfilled. In the past, managing the delicate balance of cost and performance of the ICs has been a key challenge to the mass adoption of active antennas for satellite communications.”

“Ball Aerospace has a long history of lowering the cost of phased array systems, and the new Anokiwave IC’s allow us to further reduce costs while maintaining our desired system performance,” said Jake Sauer, vice president and general manager, Tactical Solutions, Ball Aerospace. “Ball has integrated the Anokiwave IC’s into our new subarray architecture, a building block approach specifically designed to support both commercial and military end-users. This enables manufacturing economies of scale and promotes design reuse for multiple SATCOM applications – a first for the industry.”

Ball Aerospace has completed over-the-air testing of its Anokiwave IC enabled subarrays and has measured results showing transmit and receive performance over scan, switchable polarization and tapering. These test results matched, and in most cases beat, modeled estimates.