Alcan Systems

ALCAN Systems’ technology is based on original research initiated at the Institute for Microwave Engineering and Photonics (IMP) at Technische Universität Darmstadt. Prof. Rolf Jakoby, director of the IMP[3] and later co-founder of ALCAN Systems, started his research on liquid crystal in radio-frequency applications in 1999.[4] He is considered the father of LC RF applications.

Onur H. Karabey joined Jakoby’s research team as a research assistant and started to work on his PhD thesis in 2009. Dr. Karabey finished his PhD research in 2012 and published his results under the name “Electronic Beam Steering and Polarization Agile Planar Antennas in Liquid Crystal Technology” in 2014.[5]

In 2014 ALCAN, which stands for “Adaptive Liquid Crystal Antenna”, started as a research project at TU Darmstadt. Seed funding of €650,000 for the project was provided by the EXIST funding program of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy.[6]

In 2016 the project team spun out from the university and became an independent company. ALCAN Systems GmbH was founded by Onur H. Karabey, A. Burak Olcen, Esat M. Sibay and Rolf Jakoby.[1]

At the end of 2016 ALCAN raised €7.5 million in a Series A funding round. The investment was made by a consortium consisting of Merck, SES and SPC.[7][8][9]

ALCAN’s beam steering capability is implemented using a liquid crystal layer inside a phased-array antenna. The liquid crystal is controlled by an electric field which changes the direction of the received or transmitted beam without the antenna physically turning at all, so that there are no moving parts.[10]

The antennas will consist of separate receiving and transmitting apertures operating at Ku or Ka band. The switching time of the antenna between two satellites will be under 50ms, which enables the antenna to meet the requirements of MEO and LEO constellation satellites.[2] In 2018 ALCAN successfully field tested the world’s first liquid crystal based phased array antenna for satellite communication.[11]

ALCAN’s focus is to develop antennas based on requirements provided by satellite operators and service providers. ALCAN is targeting long-term a price range of under $1.000 for the consumer segment and under $10.000 for the enterprise segment. These targets can be achieved by using existing LCD production lines to produce the required liquid crystal phase shifter panels that go into the antenna.

Furthermore, ALCAN plans to produce smaller consumer antennas for land mobile, maritime and home broadband market that will develop due to the start of LEO/MEO satellites and 5G roll out.[2]