SBIR/STTR Award attributes
The cost of frontline military aircraft is high and there is a great need for significantly lower-cost but still capable, reusable, and (relative to an F-35) expendable Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS’s) to multiply sensing capability and otherwise project force in potential future conflict zones. The most advanced example of the shift toward attritable weapons is AFRL and Kratos’ XQ-58A Valkyrie. The XQ-58A will handle essential tasks such as SIGINT/ELINT detection, raise radar warning receiver (RWR) alerts, and/or bistatic synthetic aperture radar (SAR) reception that previously require a high-end manned fighter. A key objective of the low-cost requirement is to make it possible to have many of these units to gather information on many fronts and in combination with onboard or offboard offensive weapons wear down the enemy’s capabilities. This proposal is to make a RF receive Personality System (RPS) that empowers the XQ-58A UAS to accomplish this sensing task. The purpose of this SBIR is to design RF modules that will collect RF energy from an antenna array, combine small groups of these inputs at the RF layer, in the process broadly pointing their receive “beam” in a desired direction, while also shifting the RF down to a baseband frequency range that is suitable for the ADCs inputs of the Zynq Ultrascale+ to ingest. The Zynq’s will then use digital delay methods to create high gain, highly directional receive beam(s) in desired direction(s). Because some of combining gain is achieved at the RF layer, but much is also achieved at a digital signal processing (DSP) layer, this will be a hybrid beamforming system. Most modern phased arrays are hybrid as it provides a good balance between the hardware size, weight and power and cost (SWaP-C) versus capability. The capability advantages the DSP brings to the table include the ability to point multiple receive beams, steer nulls toward jamming signals, and interface easily with other DSP firmware for tasks like SIGINT/ELINT detection, radar warning, and/ or bistatic SAR reception. MagiQ Technologies is performing groundbreaking low phase noise work. Superb phase noise is needed by the AF as we up- and down-convert RF signals, because any phase noise present on our local oscillators (LOs) will translate directly onto any powerful RF tone (e.g., jammers or co-sited transmissions) that we convert up or down. This spreads the powerful tone’s energy, and will tend to obscure any weak signal-of-interest (SOI) that might be close in frequency to the more powerful tone. This effect is critical to complete SIGINT/ELINT collection. Additionally, radar resolution is very well known to be very sensitive to phase noise. This proposal expands on our plan to generate an excellent quality low phase noise LO, while at the same time keeping a very tight rein on the circuitry size. This innovation brings advantages that will add many dBs of sensitivity to the phased array system.
