FIRST RF CORPORATION — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF161-108

Description

ABSTRACT: In recent years, the defense industry has seen innovative development of smaller, lighter-weight, higher-performance and lower-cost munitions.While this innovation is set to continue into the future with more platforms, the size, weight, power, and cost (SWaP-C) of terminal-guidance seekers has not kept pace.Current seeker technology is still very limited by the architecture and method of implementation. Specifically, current state-of-the-art systems require significant total volume and high power consumption at a very high price.FIRST RF proposes a highly innovative approach to reducing the SWaP-C of these seekers by using a non-traditional beamforming approach which eliminates the discrete phase shifters and/or time delay mechanisms used in modern seekers.By so doing, much of the expensive and complicated beam steering control is eliminated.As a further benefit, this technology provides unprecedented scalability to multiple physical sizes and frequency bands, thereby enabling straightforward adaptation to a wide variety of platforms and beam-steering modes.; BENEFIT: Successful validation of the proposed FIRST RF solution will eventually lead to a lower overall price point for high-performance munitions.Additionally, because of the elimination and/or minimization of several supporting power and control functions, more volume would be freed up in the highly constrained munition.This may be used for incorporation of additional warhead, fuel, operational functions or lighter weight.Due to the scalability of this technology, it would also have benefit on other SWaP-C constrained platforms, such as UAS.Due specifically to the extremely low-cost potential, it could be extended to all forms of active electronically scanned array (AESA) phased array antennas.