DARPA program aims to reduce cost of electronic antenna systems.

• Author: Munnell, Christina

Electronic antenna systems, which are used on aircraft and other military platforms for radar, communications and electronic warfare, are notoriously costly to both develop, maintain and upgrade.

A Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program is seeking to sharply reduce the cost and years it takes to develop electronically scanned array antennas (ESA).

"The DoD customer base has been requesting ESAs for years, but it has not previously been affordable," said Lee Paulsen, a principal electrical engineer at Rockwell Collins, which recently received a $10 million DARPA award to enhance the antenna designs with more versatile, digital versions.

DAR PA's description of the Arrays at Commercial Timescales (ACT) program, said: "It is imperative to define a path toward shorter design cycles and in-field updates and push past the traditional barriers that lead to 10-year array development cycles, 20- to 30-year static life cycles and costly service life extension programs."

Rockwell Collins will develop a common building block component that makes these antenna systems reconfigurable and readily upgradeable, driving down the cost of procurement by at least 80 percent, according to Paulsen.

Roy Olsson, program manager for the microsystems technology office at DARPA, said, "The goal is to realize as much commonality as possible without degrading performance or significantly increasing power consumption."

Traditional antenna systems were mechanically steered and were designed to be application-specific. This made it difficult to upgrade the technology and use it across various platforms, Olsson explained. The ACT program, which was established in February of 2013, wants to make ESAs more adaptable by creating a standard design that can be used across multiple platforms.

Along with increased adaptability, an improved ESA system could help speed up the beam-forming process, allowing pilots to detect radar threats more quickly and make them less vulnerable to electronic warfare. Because mechanically steered systems must be physically guided, it often takes a fair amount of time to orient and aim the antennas in different directions, said Paulsen. "In an ESA, you simply set the control signals and, regardless of where the antenna was previously pointed, the beam will form in the new direction. [This] allows us to move the antenna gain pattern around in space much faster than could ever be done with motors," he said.

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