Wideband Radar Digital Beamforming for Missile Defense Applications

Phased-array radar employing wideband digital beamforming (DBF) offers the potential for detecting and tracking incoming cruise missiles while defeating electronic countermeasures such as chaff, jamming and anti-reflective coatings. A wide instantaneousradar bandwidth is essential for defeating these threats, resulting in improved range resolution and target signature. Digital beamforming may be used to defeat radar jammers by forming precise beams and steering receive nulls in the direction of hostilejammers. DBF may be used on transmit to improve target-to-clutter ratio and reduce the spillover of transmit energy in undesired directions. This wideband DBF approach also lends itself to the use of digital transmit waveforms, which may be used as afurther technique for defeating countermeasures.This SBIR effort will leverage Applied Radar's on-going work in the DBF area and direct it towards missile defense applications of vital importance to US national security. Specifically, we will research ways of significantly improving the bandwidth overthe current state-of-the-art. Our existing MMIC-based analog front-ends are sufficiently wideband. The main bandwidth bottleneck is in the real-time digital data acquisition and DBF processing. We will investigate techniques that move the data acquisitioncloser to the radar antenna array, resulting in improved performance and reduced cost. DBF technology will enable low-cost phased-array radar with better performance than currently available analog phased-array systems. This wideband DBF phased-array radar is directly applicable to current MDA threats. Applied Radar Inc. also has on-goingDBF work with the US Air Force and US Army that could directly benefit from advancements in the wideband DBF processing. Other DoD applications include space-based radar and communication systems, UAV radars, and conformal aircraft antennas. There are alsoa number of commercial applications including cellular base station antennas, commercial satellite communications and ATC radars that would benefit from advancements in DBF array technology.