Advanced Signal Processing Technologies for BMDS Radars

While enormous advances in signal processing throughput have been made over the last decade, there still have been expressed limitations of current technology to handle large data samples and extremely high data rate processing present in tactical missile defense sensor systems. Current methods employed to ameliorate this problem have focused on custom hardware solutions in the form of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and custom digital signal processors (DSPs). As a result, the solutions tend to resolve point design issues but with little flexibility for evolving requirements and at high deployment and maintenance costs. Equipment obsolescence also tends to be a characteristic of these near term solutions. While the achievements in high performance, general purpose compute power and high density memory have produced remarkable results in batch (non-real-time) processing, these have not been realizable in the signal processing domain for tactical sensor systems. However, with the recent advances in low latency interconnect technology, the opportunity is afforded to resolve current limitations of the custom solutions. This research effort will identify innovative software solutions designed to bring high performance compute opportunities to the signal processing domain.