SWISSto12 has been awarded funding from the European Space Agency’s ARTES program to develop and test additive manufactured satellite user antennas (i.e., user terminal front-ends). Cobham Antenna Systems joins the project with in kind contributions and is exploring, with SWISSto12, how additive manufactured antennas could fit into its future product portfolio.
The use of additive manufacturing for satellite user antennas is of particular interest for emerging high data throughput satellite telecommunication services in Ku-Band and Ka-Band, where traditional user antennas are currently complex and costly to produce. This collaborative project aims at showing significant weight and cost reduction for Ku-Band and Ka-Band satellite user antennas. This improvement will contribute to larger scale market penetration of high data rate satellite connectivity services.
SWISSto12 is an innovative technology company that spun off from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Switzerland in 2011. The company pioneers the development and commercialization of RF antenna, waveguide and filter products based on additive manufacturing. The company specializes in product designs, which are then 3D printed in high performance plastics and subsequently metal plated through a proprietary process.