SBIR/STTR Award attributes
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. 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 Summit Technology, Inc. (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. In this Phase II 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 6 GHz frequency range. Furthermore, a large portion of this Phase II effort will consist of Azure developing real-time firmware to implement a real-time Spectrum Sharing capability based on automatic radar waveform recognition algorithms developed by our team.
