Technology for Transmitting and Receiving Airborne, High-Speed, Wideband, Covert Communications

In response to the NavyÆs SBIR solicitation N212-111 ōTechnology for Transmitting and Receiving Airborne, High-Speed, Wideband, Covert Communicationsö,Ā MaXentric proposes LEOPARD (Linear Efficiency Optimized Phased Array with Real-time DPD) to overcome the challenges of efficient, linear amplification for phased arrays.Ā LEOPARD is designed to support both single carrier and multi-carrier C-band phased arrays.Ā Due to the SWaP constraints of the phased array application, LEOPARD is specifically designed with high efficiency and gain.Ā High linearity is achieved with our real-time predistorter MaXPALÖ.Ā Modularized LRUs (lowest replacement units) is proposed with scalability to large phased arrays.Ā In the base effort, a wideband transceiver will be designed for shipboard phased array with improved linearity.Ā Each LRU module consists of 16 elements, driving by a single RFSoC Gen3 DSP platform to support single carrier operation with wideband GaN power amplifiers.Ā Option 1 addressed the need for efficient ASIC for digital beamforming phased arrays.Ā The ASIC will integrate both the digital beamforming and the digital predistortion algorithms on proven 5G IP cores.Ā Reconfigurability and re-programmability is achieved with SmartCores.Ā Option 2 builds upon the digital phased array concept to develop high efficiency transceivers for multi-carrier, multi-beam operation.