Cobham develops new Solid State radar solutions
Cobham has developed a new affordable, reliable, and scalable family of Gallium-Nitride (GaN) Solid State Transmitter solutions.
Pronounced as 'solstice', SOLSTx is optimised for ground, maritime and airborne applications including air traffic control, weather, telemetry, fire control, and long range surveillance radars.
"The GaN-based Solid State technology on which SOLSTx is built offers a number of advantages over traditional systems such as increased Mean Time Between Critical Failure (MTBCF), reduced operation and sustainment costs, and notably, significantly lower out of band emission which reduces interference with adjacent radars and communication signals," said Jeff Hassannia, Senior Vice President of Business Development and Technology for Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions. "Our SOLSTx family of solutions is available in a variety of frequency ranges, power levels, packaging and end market applications - all of which are leveraging commercial advances in GaN coupled with innovative power combining techniques."
Cobham's modular design approach also allows for a much-preferred graceful degradation over the life of the hardware versus instantaneous shutdown as experienced with Vacuum Electronics Devices (VED); such as Magnetrons, Klystrons, Traveling Wave Tubes (TWT), and Crossed-Field Amplifiers (CFA) used in current transmitter designs.
With proven system power of 175kW in S-Band, increased efficiency is offered through reduced size, weight and power. Cobham has a 175kW S-Band SOLSTx available for viewing and demonstration at its Integrated Electronic Solutions facility in Exeter, New Hampshire.