Following the canonical lifecycle of an integrated project, the activities addressed by the ATOS consortium were focused on the requirements, specification, design, manufacturing, test and validation of innovative Earth Observation technologies.
In particular ATOS project led to the development and prototyping of a T/R module with beyond state-of-art performances in terms of bandwidth (8-12GHz) and transmitted RF power (>20W).
Its quad multilayer integration and very compact design enables high steering angles, the inclusion of delay lines allows to avoid squinting when scanning the whole bandwidth.
The T/R Module is based on a custom integrated core-chip based on SiGe technology and a custom integrated Single-Chip-Front-End (SCFE) in GaN technology, both developed in the frame of ATOS project.
In the course of the project it has been as well designed an Electronic Front End to host the developed T/R modules: the thermomechanical design of the overall assembly has been validated through the manufacturing and test of a dedicated STM (Structural Thermal Model).
Finally also a wideband (8-12 GHz) radiating panel has been designed and simulated through extensive electromagnetic simulations.
Specific dissemination activities have been carried out, with the publication of the project web site, as well as the presentation of the Project results in international contexts (e.g. European Microwave Week, PIERS, ESA workshop, ...).
On an exploitation perspective, ATOS results could be exploited to enable future missions with these capabilities:
- Possibility to manage wider frequency band (e.g. >> 2GHz @ X band) thus improving detecting capabilities of SAR instrument
- Increase of a factor of 10 the area observed in a single passage
- Enabling applications that require more than a single observation point (e.g. Moving Target Indicator);
