The new Amphinicy Blink wideband satellite software modem has been built from the ground up for speed and the unit reveals this capability every step of the way — the recent test results were published in late 2022 and that’s when it became clear that Blink is something different, achieving a continuous throughput of 4.2 Gb/s processing a 1.2 GHz carrier, all on a single server.
Blink was able to easily support two, concurrent, X-band channels on a single machine and with capacity to spare — no other commercially available software modem was even close to that capability. The company has been optimizing the code for about a year and the decision was made to run those tests again and note the results…
Blink runs at 10 Gbps… in addition to breaking through a psychological barrier, this is a significant result in a number of ways. For a start, the bandwidth that Blink can support on a single server in real time is approximately 2.5 GHz. This means that users could, for example, handle two nearly full-size Ka-band carriers, or four carriers of 600+ MHz wide, all on a single server. This is a significant capability in the light of a long list of large agency and commercial missions announcing Ka-band-class channels, up to four times wider than those used in the currently dominant X-band.
Further toward the horizon, V-band and optical space-to-ground communications are expected to push the envelope with regard to throughput. Blink’s current performance already makes usage in those bands feasible. What’s more, the 27% yearly GPU performance upgrades suggest that, by the end of 2026, Blink will be able to support 5 GHz or 20 Gbps carriers and much higher throughput with receiver-friendly modulation schemes such as on-off keying (OOK), which is in wide use in optical communications, and that would occur even if the software was not further optimized.
For decades, software modems were hampered by throughput and, therefore, constrained mostly to TT&C, where their numerous benefits could shine through: speed of development, ease of use, rapid evolution, deployment and scaling, seamless fit in a virtualized ground segment, configuration and state management, reliability and ease of integration.
A few years ago, software modems demonstrated that they can do more than TT&C. With Blink in particular, wideband payload reception became a reality, but claims to high throughput were always made with the awareness that traditional, hardware modems are the undisputed champions of high-throughput data reception.
With Blink’s latest performance upgrade, this is no longer the case: it may well be that no other, currently commercially available modem — software or hardware — can receive a single 10 Gbps signal. This is a remarkable achievement for any modem and possibly the first time in space industry history that the title goes to a pure-software modem.
Most, but not all, digitizers are too bandwidth-limited to feed Blink with the kind of bandwidth needed to achieve peak throughput. The company is working on evaluating and integrating high-performance Commercial-Off-The-Shelf (COTS) digitizers to have solutions ready for a wide array of ground station operators, including those aiming at the highest end of performance.
The product will debut at Satellite 2024, Washington DC, at booth #2547.