Phased-array radar employing wideband digital beamforming (DBF) offers the potential for detecting and tracking incoming cruise missiles while defeating electronic countermeasures such as chaff, jamming and anti-reflective coatings. A wide instantaneous radar bandwidth is essential for defeating these threats, resulting in improved range resolution and target signature. Digital beamforming may be used to defeat radar jammers by forming precise beams and steering receive nulls in the direction of hostile jammers. DBF may be used on transmit to improve target-to-clutter ratio and reduce the spillover of transmit energy in undesired directions. This wideband DBF approach also lends itself to the use of digital transmit waveforms, which may be used as a further technique for defeating countermeasures.

This SBIR effort will leverage Applied Radar's on-going work in the DBF area and direct it towards missile defense applications of vital importance to US national security. Specifically, we will research ways of significantly improving the bandwidth over the current state-of-the-art. Our existing MMIC-based analog front-ends are sufficiently wideband. The main bandwidth bottleneck is in the real-time digital data acquisition and DBF processing. We will investigate techniques that move the data acquisition closer to the radar antenna array, resulting in improved performance and reduced cost.