AZURE SUMMIT TECHNOLOGY, INC. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N191-011

Description

As sensors become more software definable, the ability to add additional capabilities to them becomes desirable as SWaP is always a premium, especially on airborne platforms – both manned and unmanned. The same can be said for apertures. The prevailing standard is that each sensor has its own aperture. In reality, that does not have to (and should not) be the case. In the high-band and low-band chassis designed for the Navy’s Triton platform as part of the Multi-INT system, Azure has architected a 16x12 fully non-blocking switch that connects to various aircraft apertures and downconverters and can route those to any tuner channel. For this effort, Azure plans to extend this approach to the C-RACAS (AN/ZPY-9) to provide high gain steerable beam outputs to the Multi-INT system to aid in both threat and friendly automatic radar identification in C-band. The added (and intended) benefit of this approach is that the C-RACAS aperture has significant performance benefits over the existing ISR SAA aperture on the Triton platform in that 5 to 6GHz frequency range. Our automated recognition capability along with the benefits of sharing aperture beams will be discussed in more detail in the technical approach.