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.

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.