Products

Cobham promises harsh-environment performance with LeanREL Electronics

Manufacturer claims full suite of ICs provides a mix of high reliability, radiation hardness, and affordability with up to 60% cost savings compared to competitive solutions.

Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions, a major provider of electronics technology and services for space and other high reliability applications, has announced the availability of its new LeanRELTM product family designed to meet the needs of small satellite and non-traditional spacecraft manufacturers.

The LeanREL product family, comprising microprocessors, microcontrollers, as well as memory and interface integrated circuits (ICs), leverages Cobham’s years of radiation-hardened, QML level reliability, and innovative space systems design expertise and offers a combination of user benefits.

LeanRel ICs are designed for space-flight, military and aerospace applications that need to operate and survive in harsh environments while remaining cost competitive. Based on the same QML pedigree and silicon as the company’s HiRel solutions, Cobham’s LeanREL ICs can enable significant cost savings—up to 60% depending on quantities, to extend mission durations well beyond that of typical off-the-shelf ICs and greatly speeds up time to market through rapid prototyping.

“Cobham has created LeanREL as a cost-effective QML alternative to address the growing need to decrease costs while finding just the right level of reliability and radiation-hardness for new classes of missions,” said Kevin Jackson, Vice President and General Manager, Space and Semiconductor Solutions, Cobham Advanced Electronic Solutions.

With the rapidly increasing range of missions, including very large constellations, pressure is mounting on systems designers to find IC solutions that balance the critical tradeoffs between cost, reliability, and radiation hardness. This has given rise to a tiered cost versus performance profile with off-the-shelf ICs at the low end, QML at the high end, and LeanREL in between. A key benefit of Cobham’s LeanREL approach is that the components retain an identical pin out and footprint to that of their QML counterparts, thus enabling system designers to develop platforms that can span from commercial constellations to QML level missions.

As part of the LeanREL family launch, Cobham will release a suite of products during 2019 with an Arm Microcontroller and Controller Area Network (CAN) Transceiver available now.

The LEON Microprocessor; Low Voltage Differential Signaling (LVDS) Receiver and Driver; Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory (SDRAM); NOR Flash Memory; Voltage Supervisor and additional product releases are planned to be launched in phrases throughout the year.