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Recent breakthroughs in radar technology combined with the demand for compact, affordable and high precision radar for military and commercial applications, has led to a renaissance in the methods and use of radar. Many of the upcoming sectors of technology growth, namely autonomous vehicles, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and various commercial/civilian applications, rely upon solid-state radar and new methods of fabrication and programming. This resurgence is a byproduct of escalating advancements in radar, stealth and jamming technologies for defense that is driving conventional radar solutions into obsolescence,1 A wide accessibility to sophisticated digital-signal processing (DSP), agile RF transceivers and cuttingedge antenna techniques is fueling this accelerating change.
Editor's Note: A complementary article introducing some of the new radar applications using the technologies described in this article is included in the online issue of Microwave Journal and can be viewed at www.mwjournal.com/radarapplications.
Pasternack
Irvine, Calif.
A contributing factor to enhanced capabilities and decreased costs is the development of new antenna and radar fabrication technologies. Among these, GaN power transistors, low noise amplifiers (LNA) and active electronically steered array (AESA) antennas have been central to recent radar and radar jammer military contract awards and system deployments around the globe. Radars employing these technologies outperform conventional radar systems and have spurred a flood of new and innovative radar design and fabrication approaches. New AESA technologies have enabled an evolution to higher (millimeter wave) frequencies providing greater resolution with smaller phased-array antennas, while modular design approaches enable rapid adoption of new digital processing and computation techniques.
Active Electronically Steered Array (AESA)
In prior decades, phased array antennas greatly improved the form factor and performance of conventional radar. A more recent enhancement is enabled by greater DSP and computational methods. Active electronic beam steering (or beamforming), leverages the performance benefits of phased array antennas and introduces active steering, greatly reducing the maintenance costs and failure rates of mechanically steered radar antennas while increasing radar scanning speed and accuracy2 (see Figure 1). Among the industry leaders are Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and Thales; but, there are many other companies with active development in this area. AESA radar is in high demand for the retrofit, upgrade and replacement of legacy radar technology.
In the latest breed, the transmit/receive (TR)...