Northrop Grumman has selected space applications advanced electronics provider SEAKR Engineering to build an advanced space signal processor.

The Wolverine processor will be used on two new GEOStar satellites, which will be launched in 2022.

GEOStar satellites are designed and developed to be able to provide communications services such as direct-to-home TV broadcasting, broadband connectivity, cable programme distribution and business data network capacity.

Northrop Grumman is SEAKR’s second customer to use the Wolverine processor, which is a new radio frequency (RF) reconfigurable processor.

The device is capable of processing 10GHz of bandwidth for several applications. It also has ‘a high level of on-orbit reconfigurable processing capability’.

Commercial Satellites vice-president Amer Khouri said:  “SEAKR’s Wolverine technology is highly flexible with on-orbit reprogrammable capabilities.

“These are key features that our new satellite customers are looking for.”

The RF processor has been designed making use of ‘four generations of architectural capability’ to support all the needs of payload processing performance.

The technologies from SEAKR, which are being implemented or used include analogue-to-digital converter (ADC) and digital-to-analogue converter (DAC) technologies, as well as FPGA-based and application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) based processing technologies.

Last month, the company received a patent for an advanced RF processing ASIC technology in Canada.

In July, the company was selected by Saturn Satellite Networks to build digital RF processors for small GEO satellite known as ‘NationSat’.