Increasing the capacity of Very High Throughput Satellites (VHTS) while decreasing their cost has become an important area of interest. This can be met by minimizing size, weight and power consumption (SWaP) when accounting for the advantages photonic components bring. Photonics offers a limitless bandwidth in THz range at the band around 1550 nm. Lightweight and low volume photonic components are capable of handling high data rates and frequencies and offer almost lossless propagation in an optical fibre and immunity to Electromagnetic Interference (EMI). However, the use of photonic devices is currently restricted to a few demonstrations in non-critical equipment and with limited degree of integration. This paper presents the system design of an innovative photonic enabled digital payload called PhLEXSAT suited for future Terabit per second satellites by focusing on the advancement of the maturity level of key photonic technologies up to TRL5. The Tbps-like software defined photonic payload architecture incorporates advanced broadband photonic ADC and photonic DAC with digital processing firmware with a high degree of miniaturization and power-consumption efficiency. The selected photonic sampler architecture consists of two main components: Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) modulators PIC and high-linear photodetector (HL-PD) PIC. The photonic sampler is driven by a space-grade pulsed laser which acts as a frequency clock. PhLEXSAT project, funded under the European Union H2020, is led by DAS Photonics in cooperation with MDA UK, Eutelsat, Axenic, HHI Fraunhofer and Argotech.
Chatterjee et al. (Fri,) studied this question.