Aerospace & Defence: Breaking the SWaP Bottleneck with Ideal Switch Technology

Aerospace & Defence — October 2, 2025

Featuring Chris Keimel, Menlo Micro CTO

Ensuring robust, high-quality, mission-critical communications in the adverse environment of space places extremely demanding requirements on satellite system designers.

Each gram of mass, milliwatt of energy consumption and cubic centimeter of occupied volume are scrutinized right down to the size, weight, and power (SWaP) implications of each constituent component.

The SWaP specifications of multitude of embedded switches have a fundamental impact on the operation of the beamformers and a significant influence on the overall performance of the satellite.

The physical space occupied by switches affects the dimensions of the sub-system, their aggregated mass has launch and operational considerations, the electric power consumption places demand on the solar arrays and the heat generated needs to be managed and dissipated in an appropriate way.

Legacy systems and their limitations

Component life expectancy is of primary importance in a situation where failure could be fatal for the host device and issue resolution options are limited. Accordingly, a preference had emerged for solid state switches, capable of billions of operations.

However, with insertion losses of up to 6 dB, significant passive power consumption, and maximum power handling capabilities of around 5 W, solid-state switches are not without their limitations.

They dissipate significant heat waste, which requires substantial thermal management solutions such as large heat sinks to remain operational.

The bulky, heavy, and power-hungry nature of solid-state switches is therefore impeding the development of mission-critical communications and limiting more rapid adoption of processor-hungry technologies such as AI that are capable of bringing more autonomy to space missions.

The role of RF switch technology

On satellites, switches fulfill the role of routing signals in the payload and control the operation of attenuators and phase shifters that feed phased-array antennas to manage the beamforming.

Agile, efficient, and effective beamforming is critical to ensuring availability and quality-of-service of the communications link. However, system designers need to reconcile these requirements without burdening the satellite or tactical radio with an impractical demand for size, weight, and power.

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