Johan Leijtens, Lens R&D B.V.
Frank Stelwagen, Systematic Design B.V.
Johan Leijtens, Systems Engineer/CEO, Lens R&D B.V.
Since November 2018, Lens R&D B.V. has been developing a single chip true digital Sunsensor in cooperation with Systematic design B.V. The activities employed in frame of an ESA ARTES AT (advance technology) contract and supported by the Dutch space agency NSO, have been performed in two phases. As large companies with significant space heritage like Leonardo and TNO tried before and failed to come up with a working sensor that could be cost effectively produced, the initial phase consisted of a functional demonstration of the working principle.
Halfway through the demonstration process ESA concluded that the demonstrator was probably going to work but would not lead to anything useful due to the lack of funding to provide the required level of build in test, radiation tolerance and number of pixels to use it for a real Sunsensor.
Consequently a CCN was agreed upon that allowed to perform full radiation hardening and the production of silicon that can be used in real flight hardware when proven fully functional.
To achieve this, special design processes and processing steps not included in so called multi project wafer runs had to be used and consequently the chips are now produced on full wafers while using a so called multi layer mask process (MLM).
The presentation will focus on the developments associated with the sensors, measurement results obtained and way forward during the development.