Affordable Digital Receiver/Exciter for Missile Defense Radars

A program is proposed to leverage the radar technology developed by Global Delta LLC as part of the Navy’s Maritime Identification and Surveillance Technology (MIST) project to develop affordable digital receiver/exciters. Global Delta’s development of affordable techniques for digital beamforming has focused on designs that rely on the use of state-of-the-art digital circuits to generate waveforms that can precisely form and steer antenna beams without the use of costly phase shifters or time-delay circuitry. Digital beam forming on a pulse to pulse basis permits adaptive control of the radar beam for angle position and frequency and the capability to interleave pulse trains at different frequencies while retaining the coherency of each of several pulse trains. T/R modules suitable for X-band and Ku band use have been investigated by Global Delta as elements of active electronic scanned array (AESA) radar systems. Test modules have been developed at X-band and are in the processes of being integrated into a maritime surveillance radar. The RF-to-digital receiver, combined with the digital exciter for waveform generation provides an affordable element of a high-power active electronic scanned antenna system. The fundamental design objective is a plug-in module that is interchangeable with other modules in an AESA.