FIRST RF CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: AF161-052

Description

The dynamic geopolitical climate of recent years has shifted the focus of the United States Armed Forces and Department of Defense (DoD) away from insurgency and toward near-peer adversaries. Maintaining battlefield dominance against well-equipped and highly capable military forces requires innovative, capable, adaptable, and scalable radio frequencies (RF) technologies—particularly those supporting electronic attack (EA), communications, and radar systems. Traditionally, these functions have been individually supported by monolithic, highly specialized, and expensive antenna systems. In recent years, concurrent breakthroughs in wideband, wide-coverage phased arrays and commercially available RF electronics have set the stage for new technologies to replace and combine these systems’ front ends with smaller, multi-functional, lower-cost, and more capable equipment. However, the characteristics that enable these improvements require new methods of controlling these arrays, either to support new operational modes (e.g., multi-beam capability) or to properly account for the design aspects that enable this expanded performance (e.g., irregular arrays of broadband elements). These considerations include new beamformer-based methods of monitoring and controlling additional performance metrics, including active impedance, prime power limitations, thermal management, etc. FIRST RF’s proposed work leverages our decades-long experience with wideband antennas, phased arrays, and advanced beamforming to demonstrate a robust, scalable, and reconfigurable mechanism for accomplishing wideband, multi-beam, multifunctional beamforming.