Teledyne Micropac Introduces the World’s First Configurable 3U VPX Power Supply Card for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) Satellites
DALLAS, April 4, 2024 -- Teledyne Micropac, a leader in space level microcircuit modules and components for “mission critical” space applications, debuted a patent-pending 3U VPX Power Supply Card (PSC) today that enables engineers to design high efficiency and power dense satellites for Low Earth Orbit (LEO) missions without compromising safety and performance goals, The new VPX-3USP-PSC family of power supply cards provides up to 600W total output power.
Innovations in distributed power are helping satellite manufacturers overcome critical barriers to time to market. The Teledyne Micropac PSC is designed for 3U Open VPX systems. Designers can build more configurable, efficient and reliable solutions faster than ever before with the Teledyne Micropac PSC. The use of GaN technology enables high efficiency (93%). It accelerates design and integration times with compliance to PMBus, VITA, and MIL-STD compliance. Teledyne Micropac’s planned stocking of standard catalog items ensure shorter lead times.
The first product in the VPX-3U-SP-PSC family of power supply cards converts 28 Volts to 6 different power rails. Each power rail offers a hardware-selectable or software commanded range of voltages. The power rails are nominally 3.3V, 5V, and 12V (main) and 3.3V and +/- 12V (auxiliary). Nearly all PMBus commands are supported by the VPX-3U-SP-PSC.
The cards perform up to a TID of 30KRad and are immune to SEL of 37MeV-cm2/mg. The cards are designed to comply with the following government standards: MIL-STD704F, MIL-STD-461, and MIL-STD-1275E; and the following VITA standards: VITA 46.0, VITA 46.11, VITA 48.0, VITA 62.0, and VITA 78.0.
"Satellite designers today face a unique set of challenges to optimize system efficiency and time-to-market," said Bill King, VP of Microelectronics at Teledyne Micropac. "Not only is this standard 3U VPX solution a widely-used format, but the ability to choose either software or hardware output voltage control provides great flexibility to our customers. We frequently get requests for output voltages outside of the standard, and this flexibility in a widely used VPX package will help engineers reach the highest levels of power supply performance.”
