Contested space, where nations compete for military dominance outside Earth’s atmosphere, is driving many military space platforms, but commercial space and small satellites continue to change the way the military suppliers of space electronics approach radiation-hardened component design from testing to deployment.
The wave of commercially developed communications and remote-sensing satellites seeks to balance costs, capability, size, weight, and power consumption in the latest new space designs.
Mark Hamlyn, Apogee Semiconductor’s CTO, was interviewed at the Veteran Entrepreneur Forum organized by JP Morgan and Bunker Labs.
Apogee Semiconductor’s technology could help enable the space agency’s exploration of the Moon—and beyond.
Apogee Semiconductor is one of 14 partner companies—along with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and Elon Musk’s SpaceX—whose technologies could help enable NASA’s “Moon to Mars” exploration. The space agency partners with companies to work on advanced space technologies.
Apogee Semiconductor was awarded by NASA to work with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, to develop a flexible, radiation-hardened switching power controller capable of being configured based on a mission’s power needs. The plan is for this technology to be used for missions to the Moon, Mars, Jupiter’s moon Europa, and other destinations.
A Building Block Approach To Better Power Supply ICs: Apogee is working to bridge this technology gap between commercial and rad hard power components by developing rad hard building block functions, which customers can use to implement power conversion or power management functions.