The California-based startup Elve announced that it has qualified a family of 100-watt traveling wave tube amplifiers (TWTs) for use in spaceflight. The qualification covers the harsh environmental conditions associated with space, paving the way for the technology to move from hardware development to testing on a space mission.
Diana Gamzina, the company’s chief executive officer, said Elve had qualified not just one product, but a family of 100-watt products. She explained that the achievement was made possible with funding from the U.S. Space Force Small Business Innovation Research program.
Next Step: Operational Orbital Test
Elve plans to demonstrate its technology within a year aboard an operational spacecraft, according to Gamzina, who emphasized that the upcoming mission will not be merely a demonstration. The company did not provide additional details in the material about the spacecraft’s name, launch date, or the mission that will host the test.
TWT amplifiers increase the power of high-frequency signals, while millimeter waves refer to frequency bands that can support the transmission of large amounts of data. According to Gamzina, providing high-power amplifiers at these frequencies could increase the bandwidth available for uplink and downlink communications in satellite constellations, and could also help imaging satellites transmit their data to Earth more quickly.
What Changes in Practice?
The significance of the qualification is that designing amplifiers into space systems requires hardware capable of withstanding the operating environment before being approved for an actual mission. Elve says its products are intended to be priced to allow their integration into system designs, while benefiting from the efficiency of traveling wave tube amplifiers compared with the alternative solid-state power amplifier technology.
The qualification alone does not mean that the technology has demonstrated its full performance in orbit; the anticipated operational test remains the stage at which the company will verify its use on an actual spacecraft. Therefore, the current achievement focuses on the hardware’s readiness for the space environment, rather than announcing a communications service or a completed space system.
Company Background
Gamzina founded Elve in 2020 after working at the Millimeter-Wave Research Center at the University of California, Davis, the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, and the European Space Agency. The company aims to redesign millimeter-wave amplifiers and reduce their cost. Elve also raised $15 million in funding in 2024.
Abi Sivananthan, vice president of technology at In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture-capital company focused on the security of the United States and its allies and one of Elve’s investors, said that space-ready products support rapid, large-scale deployment missions. For her part, Jennifer Salmon, Elve’s chief product officer, described the qualification as verification that the hardware is suitable for harsh environments and as paving the way for the final orbital demonstration.