Cobham Develops Gallium Nitride Solid State Transmitter Solutions

Cobham has developed a new family of Gallium-Nitride (GaN) Solid State Transmitter solutions. 

Pronounced as "solstice," SOLSTx is optimized for ground, maritime and airborne applications including air traffic control, weather, telemetry, fire control, and long range surveillance radars, the company said in a statement Monday.

"The GaN-based Solid State technology on which SOLSTx has 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 with advances in GaN coupled with innovative power combining techniques," he added.

Cobham's modular design allows 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.