Feasibility Study of Next Generation Digital Array Radar

Abstract

Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) Radar is based on the use of an array antenna that allows the electronic beam steering. This approach makes the AESA dominant over older mechanical and Passive Electronically Scanned Array (PESA) radars. Instead of shifting the phaseof signals from a single high-power transmitter, AESA constitutes up to thousands of small transmit-receive (TR) modules behind each antenna element that control the amplitude and phase of signal to direct the energy in a desired direction. AESA Radars have significant advantages including beam agility,increased reliability, and long-range capability, resistance to electronic jamming, low interception, and multi-mode capability. However, these advantages are achieved at a cost of higher complexity, power consumption and higher development expenses. In order to address the above issues, search for the next generation radar technology has been underway in the last few years. Spurred by rapid development in system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for analog, mixed-signal, and RF circuits, newer software definedarchitectures, and a new trend towards increasing the digital portion of the radars overthe analog and RF part is observed. Termed as the Digital Array Radar (DAR), it aimsto incorporate an RF-to-bit capability behind each antenna element in its array. The architecture generally has a transceiver per element, with the signal from each elementbeing digitized separately. This provides the maximum number of degrees of freedom for adaptive processing and multiple beamforming. Element-level digital array radar promises to offer the solution which results into significant advantages including multiple receive beams, agility, increased scalability, increased flexibility, and re-configurability. This thesis will focus on the feasibility study of next generation digital array radarand include a) approaches regarding possible transition paths from AESA to DAR b) power handling assessment c) cost analysis supported by a design case study.