Renesas Powers a New Space Race

India’s historic Chandrayaan-3 lunar landing at the Moon’s southern pole is the latest indicator that the space business is booming again.

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This is especially true for Renesas Electronics, which is honored to have supplied the Chandrayaan-3 mission with more than 30 Renesas radiation hardened components. In keeping with our goal to provide aerospace engineers with high-reliability (HiRel) solutions to meet the demanding requirements of traditional and ‘new space’ applications, we also recently completed a space-ready reference design for the AMD XQR Versal™ adaptive system-on-chip (SoC). This new design integrates key radiation hardened power management components that support a wide range of power rails for next-generation space avionics systems. In a recent interview, Chris Stephens, VP and GM of the HiRel Business Division, provided a look inside what’s driving the space race for Renesas and what lies ahead.

Q: What’s going on in space, and why does it seem like we’re seeing a resurgence in launch activity?

Chris: I would say there's been a renaissance in space that began about 2016, and today every country and space agency is doing more. A lot of this is being driven by what SpaceX was able to do with their reusable Falcon launch vehicles. Things have become very turn-key and much more reliable and cost efficient. There are far fewer scrubs and cancellations than was common 15 years ago, and the cost of putting a payload into space is less, because of easier and cheaper access to the launch vehicles. It's much more feasible to launch a satellite at $1400 per kilogram vs. the ~$55,000 per kilogram costs from previous decades.