Professor Claudio Paoloni from the School of Engineering has been awarded £390,000 as part of a £33 million investment into the National Space Programme. This project builds upon existing Travelling Wave Tube (TWT) technology to send data from satellites much more quickly and efficiently. It will involve developing a satellite transmitter that will enable ultra-capacity satellite links to carry more data than ever before.

A total of 23 projects have been funded by the UK Space Agency’s National Space Innovation Programme which is being used to invest in high-potential technologies and drive innovation across the UK. Professor Paoloni’s project is one of the 15 ‘Kick Starter’ projects awarded through the fund that aim to support technologies and applications that are in an earlier stage of development. The goal is to increase their readiness for use in commercial and scientific endeavours for the future.

The project is part of Professor Paoloni’s TWT Fab Sub-Terahertz Engineering Centre, which aims to be the first to use and show the feasibility of a Multiple Input Multiple Output, better known as MIMO, for space communications at Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The challenge is to substantially increase the transmission of data from future constellations of LEO satellites to the ground. Exchange of data is a fundamental part of our daily lives, by our computers, electronic devices, and even wearables such as smart watches. Data transmission from space is quickly and vastly growing, permitting a ubiquitous coverage of the Earth. The project will work on improving ways to do this by integrating networks on the ground with networks in space – with this outcome being one of the main objectives of 6G.

The MIMO combines several streams of data together at the same frequency, making it possible to transmit a lot more data in the same frequency bands. However, a major obstacle to enabling satellite MIMO at sub-THz frequencies is the need for powerful amplifiers, which are currently not in existence. The Lancaster team are therefore developing such amplifiers, utilising TWT technology as the core for the transmitters. TWT technologies have the capability to amplify radio signals in a way that is not achievable with standard transistor amplifiers, which have been the prevailing technology utilised in LEO systems up until now.

Professor Paoloni said: “I am very excited to contribute together with my collaborators at Lancaster TWT Fab to the advancement of new network paradigms integrating terrestrial and non-terrestrial links by an innovative and challenging concept of high data rate MIMO transmitter at sub-THz frequency.”