Thales Alenia Space is to lead from Spain the consortium of a revolutionary project, called SCOPS (Scalable COntroller for Power Sources) that will position European industry at the forefront of the development of cost effective solutions, accelerating its leadership in the ‘New Space’ of small satellites and mega-constellations, two key paradigms of space development in the 21st century. SCOPS, which officially started in Tres Cantos (Spain) on March 23rd and will end in December 2026, is part of the European Commission's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation program, one of whose pillars is European autonomy in space.
The European aerospace industry depends today on non-European countries as USA, where most of the Mixed Signal ASIC (Application-Specific Integrated Circuit) are produced, the electronic chips considered to be the “brains” of the satellites and one of the elements that are more costly to produce.
The objective of SCOPS is to provide the European space community with a scalable controller device for power sources, an ASIC that will allow the control of various power supply lines in parallel. A flexible circuit that will overcome the limitations of existing controller devices in terms of intelligence, performance level, features, and radiation robustness, enabling the design of competitive, space power supplies for multiple applications, such as highly integrated digital processors, active antenna amplification modules or high-speed image and video processors and compressors, among others. These units, in turn, will become the core of new space missions for telecommunications, Earth observation and space exploration.