Jane Edwards
A Raytheon Technologies business unit has secured a $12.7M contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop phased array antenna technology using a “building blocks†approach for the second phase of DARPA’s Millimeter-Wave Digital Arrays program.
“Millimeter-wave is less crowded than other parts of the RF spectrum on the battlefield, but current hardware is complex, tailored to a specific task and not interoperable,†Tay Fitzgerald, vice president for advanced concepts and technology at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, said in a statement published Wednesday.
Fitzgerald added that the company’s microelectronics design is flexible to open up a range of capabilities, including electronic warfare, communications and radars, for smaller platforms.
The company said it expects work on the second phase of the MIDAS program to result in the development and delivery of hardware for use in testing.
Each chip or element in Raytheon’s building block receives and transmits and can be merged digitally to produce millimeter-wave beams, scan the RF spectrum and link various platforms in a 3D space.
DARPA awarded the MIDAS Phase I contract to Raytheon in 2018 and the company’s work on the program’s initial phase led to the development of a digital/RF transceiver, aperture radar and a monolithic microwave integrated circuit.
