Development of Digital Receiver/Exciters for Missile Defense Radars

Anticipated threats to missile defense radars are a challenging mixture of countermeasures and simulation. Future systems are expected to incorporate multi-channel adaptive digital beam-forming to counter the active threats and therefore require affordable, high performance digital receivers and digital exciters. This phased array radar technology research effort is focused on developing low-cost, low-power, compact digital exciter technologies. One novel design approach for such application is a direct analog synthesis approach. This Phase 1 proposal describes Hittite’s approach for miniaturized direct synthesizers suitable for T/R module applications with X-band outputs. A block diagram of the proposed T/R module is proposed along with the MMICs required to support it. These new MMICs include filters and a Phase locked microwave reference to be used to reduce the module size and complexity. A calibration technique for synchronizing Hittite’s resettable frequency dividers is proposed.