Analysis: a standard product on a long fuse

The order is small and the language around it is precise about what stage the programme has reached. Samples and funded enhancements are pre-production activities, and the company itself points to constellations entering service from 2029 as the reference point for volume. On that framing the EUR 1.1 million is not revenue guidance. It is evidence that one customer has moved from evaluating the part to paying for changes to it, which is a stronger signal than a sample order alone and a weaker one than a supply agreement.

What makes the programme worth following is the product model rather than the amount. A design services contract earns fees once. A standard product, if adopted, earns silicon revenue from every terminal shipped, and can be sold to several terminal makers from the same mask set. That is also the risk: EnSilica carries the development cost of a part with no committed volume behind it, and the ESA and UK Space Agency funding that started the work does not extend to guaranteeing a customer.

The technical positioning explains why a single customer’s enhancement requests matter. Hybrid beamforming leaves an architectural choice open, the number of antenna elements feeding each digital channel, and EnSilica describes practical ratios ranging from a few elements per converter to a few dozen depending on link budget, interference and cost. A part specified for one ratio and one band plan may not suit another maker’s aperture. Paid enhancements can either generalise the device towards more customers or tune it towards one, and nothing published so far says which is happening here.

Three things would change the reading. The first is any disclosure that moves the ENS92040 from samples to a supply agreement with volumes attached. The second is a second named or unnamed customer for the same part, which is what distinguishes a standard product from a bespoke design paid for by one client. The third is the appearance of a satellite communications revenue line in the group accounts that is separable from design services, because until then the programme’s economics remain a description of a market rather than a measured contribution.

What the documents say

EnSilica plc (AIM: ENSI) said on 22 July 2026 that it had received follow-on orders worth EUR 1.1 million from a European satellite communications customer for its ENS92040 digital beamformer, the chip it is developing for flat-panel satellite user terminals. The booking comprises EUR 350,000 for additional sample deployments and EUR 750,000 for product enhancements, and the company links the production phase to satellite constellations entering service from 2029.

What was ordered

The two components of the order describe different stages of the same programme. Sample deployments put working silicon in a customer’s hands for evaluation in its own hardware. Product enhancements are paid engineering work on the device itself, which means the customer is funding changes rather than simply testing what exists. Neither is a production order, and the customer has not been named.

EnSilica is a fabless designer, so its revenue comes first from design services and later, if a part reaches volume, from silicon supply. The ENS92040 belongs to the second category. It is sold as an application specific standard product, a part offered to any terminal maker rather than built for one client, which is why the timing of a production ramp matters more to the company than the size of any individual order.

What the ENS92040 does

The device sits inside an electronically steerable antenna. On EnSilica’s own product pages the part carries four receive and four transmit signal paths. Each receive path has a dedicated IQ analogue-to-digital converter, filtering, IQ and DC correction, an equaliser, a numerically controlled oscillator and true-time delay for wide-band digital beamforming without squint. Each transmit path carries complex gain, true-time delay, digital pre-distortion and crest factor reduction, and a final IQ digital-to-analogue converter. Devices are chained together over a JESD204B interface into an FPGA or modem, with sample timing preserved so the array stays coherent. The company’s case study for the part, where it is labelled EN92040, describes an Arm Cortex-M4 with a floating point unit controlling beam-steering coefficients, array calibration and the surrounding converters and phase-locked loops.

That design sits inside a larger family. EnSilica lists beamforming chips covering Ka-band from 17.7 to 31 GHz and Ku-band from 10.7 to 14.5 GHz, including the ENS92051, a 16-channel dual beam receive analogue beamformer, the ENS92052, an 8-channel transmit device, and Ka-band parts such as the ENS92031 with 8 receive paths at 17.7 to 21.2 GHz and the ENS92032 with 8 transmit paths at 27.5 to 31 GHz. It has also built a Ka-band phased array demonstrator around its own parts so customers can measure beamforming, power and integration behaviour before committing.

In a technical article published on 25 June 2026, the company set out the reasoning behind the hybrid approach. A fully analogue array is compact and power efficient but suffers from beam squint and limited calibration once bandwidth grows. A fully digital array digitises every element, which allows multi-beam operation and adaptive nulling but requires so many converters, clocks and digital channels at Ku and Ka-band that power and thermal design become impractical for mass-market terminals. The hybrid split keeps analogue beamforming at sub-array level and moves higher-level beam shaping into a smaller number of digital channels. EnSilica also states that generating local oscillators on each tile, rather than distributing a Ka-band oscillator across a whole panel, cut phase-locked loop power by around 80 percent in simulation against a single high-performance commercial device.

The public funding route

The programme began with public money. EnSilica announced on 17 February 2023 that it had won a contract to develop a chip for next-generation mass-market satellite broadband user terminals through the European Space Agency’s Advanced Research in Telecommunications Systems Core Competitiveness programme, with support from the UK Space Agency. Dietmar Schmitt, head of the technologies and products division at ESA, said the agency was pleased to continue its collaboration with EnSilica through that programme.

The funding pool behind it was announced by the UK Space Agency on 23 January 2023, which set out £50 million for satellite communications projects under ARTES, covering constellations, ground systems and end-to-end services. The same statement put UK participation in ESA programmes at £1.8 billion over five years, with £190 million committed specifically to international telecommunications missions, and described a satellite communications industry contributing £10.4 billion to the economy and more than 26,600 jobs.