NASA SBIR 2007 Solicitation

SMALL BUSINESS CONCERN (Firm Name, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Innoflight, Inc.
5850 Oberlin Dr., Ste. 340
San Diego, CA 92121 - 4712
(858) 638-1580

PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR/PROJECT MANAGER (Name, E-mail, Mail Address, City/State/Zip, Phone)
Jeffrey Janicik
jjanicik@innoflight.com
5850 Oberlin Dr., Ste. 340
San Diego, CA 92121 - 4712
(858) 638-1580

Expected Technology Readiness Level (TRL) upon completion of contract: 4 to 5

TECHNICAL ABSTRACT (Limit 2000 characters, approximately 200 words)
Space-to-ground communications have long been stuck in a prehistoric era of telemetry systems from the throughput and hardware availability perspective. From the throughput perspective, there has been an increased need in higher uplink and downlink rates for on-orbit operations. On the hardware side, long lead, single channel radios have been a programmatic nightmare to acquire and more and more problematic to operate given the frequency crowding.

This study proposes a modern architecture based transceiver that comes to provide one integrated solution to all these issues. This proposal will design demonstrate a transceiver which can operate on both SGLS and USB uplinks and be fully frequency and mode programmable both during integration, and on the fly. In addition it will offer selectable channels for various mission profiles. Last but most important, it will use spectrally efficient modulation formats to enable high speed uplinks and support advanced communications protocols.

POTENTIAL NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
Many spacecraft applications will be able to take advantage of the high performance IP transceiver. The applications apply to NASA, DoD, and commercial sectors as one. Applications include responsive space missions that receive frequency assignment shortly before launch. Commercial missions will find this solution attractive when they need to provide service in different ITU regions (different frequencies). It will also support many research missions (and even more, tactical missions) that need to upload new code for processors and embedded devices. Any mission that suffers from unintentional harmful interference can take advantage of the frequency agility and mutual interference issues can be resolved without having to compromise services. This same functionality can be used in NASA research missions in which there are several distinct phases and switching between different services is needed.

POTENTIAL NON-NASA COMMERCIAL APPLICATIONS (Limit 1500 characters, approximately 150 words)
With the onset of net-centric communication systems in space especially with the DoD, the technology found in the high performance IP transceiver will be a must have to maintain efficient and reliable links. Innoflight's current research and network test results suggest that straight IP communication protocols and applications can work well beyond LEO.

NASA's technology taxonomy has been developed by the SBIR-STTR program to disseminate awareness of proposed and awarded R/R&D in the agency. It is a listing of over 100 technologies, sorted into broad categories, of interest to NASA.

TECHNOLOGY TAXONOMY MAPPING

Architectures and Networks Highly-Reconfigurable RF