SAN FRANCISCO – California startup Elve has qualified its 100-watt millimeter-wave Traveling Wave Tube Amplifier platform for spaceflight.
With U.S. Space Force Small Business Innovation Research funding, Elve “didn’t just qualify one product, we qualified a family of 100-watt products” for the environmental conditions of space, Elve CEO Diana Gamzina told SpaceNews.
Within a year, Elve will prove its technology on an operational spacecraft, “not just a demonstrator,” said Gamzina, who earned a PhD in mechanical and aerospace engineering from the University of California, Davis.
“To interconnect the world, you need a lot of data to be able to go up as well as down from our satellite constellations,” Gamzina said. “Having amplifiers at high power levels available at these millimeter wave frequencies gives you a lot of bandwidth and unlocks access to high-data-rate connectivity.”
Millimeter-wave amplifiers also will help imaging satellites deliver data to the ground quickly, Gamzina said.
After working at the University of California Davis Millimeter-wave Research Center, Stanford Linear Accelerator Center and European Space Agency, Gamzina founded Elve in 2020 to redesign millimeter-wave amplifiers and slash their prices. Elve raised $15 million in 2024.
Elve amplifiers are offered “at a cost point where it is something you can design into your system,” Gamzina said. “As a result, constellation can benefit from the efficiency of” traveling wave tube amplifiers compared to alternative solid-state power amplifier technology.
“This space qualification readiness milestone positions Elve’s products for missions critical to the rapid, proliferated deployments required in space,” Abi Sivananthan, vice president of technology for In-Q-Tel, a nonprofit venture capital firm focused on U.S. national and allied security and Elve investor, said in Elve’s Aug. 19 news release.
“Reaching this operational benchmark represents a pivotal moment for Elve and our stakeholders,” Jennifer Salmon, Elve chief product officer, said in the news release. “The qualification has validated our hardware for the harshest environments, making mmWave power accessible at scale for modern space architectures. Moving to the final orbital demonstration is a step we are eager to take.”
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