By Geoff Fein
The Navy has been working to open up radar systems into major subsystems in an effort to increase competition and the availability of parts at the subsystem level, according to a service official.
“This is sort of the first thrust we have taken in driving an open architecture (OA) inside the radar itself,” said Michael Pollock, Office of Naval research program manager, surface and aerospace surveillance.
“What we have done is broken radars up into several blocks,” he added.
Examples include the antenna unit, receiver exciters, digital beam forming, and digital signal processing and even radar control processing systems, Pollock said.
“We’ve gone in and written OA specifications around each one of those blocks and how they should operate as a system,” he added. “So that’s really what we are doing within what we call the open architecture radar specification here in the Navy.”
According to Pollock, the Navy hopes to increase competition at both the systems and subsystems level with this approach.
“We’d also like to be able to reuse these subsystems across multiple programs, so if we build a good piece of technology for a particular radar system, we’d like to reuse that same piece of technology on another shipboard, land-based or even airborne radar,” Pollock said. “And, if we own the specifications, it allows us to do that.”
Also, this approach enables performance-based request for proposals (RFP), he added.
“We can get the best of breed for a given subsystem and, if that vendor is not capable of actually building the performance that was first anticipated, we can go back out on the street with that same RFP and select yet another vendor as long as he maintains the interface standards,” Pollock explained.
The radar effort will also enable small companies to compete for a piece of the program, he added.
“The level of the subsystem that we picked for the blocks was intended to allow multiple vendors, including smaller vendors who happen to have very good products inside each one of those boxes,” Pollock said.
As a matter of fact, the small companies often can more rapidly develop those boxes than some of the large primes, Pollock added. “We are [hoping] that this encourages small to medium businesses to bid subsystems to our radars,” he added.
Unlike a lot of the open architecture efforts inside the Navy, ONR’s radar effort has not specified that commercial off the shelf (COTS) systems be a requirement.
“We haven’t specified that these are COTS subsystems. What we are really trying to do is get the best of both worlds, either COTS or GOTS (government off the shelf) or S&T (science and technology) developed products,” Pollock said.
The idea is to have these subsystems and systems easily inserted into the architecture. That would mean building them to a set of specifications that allow that to be inserted, he said.
“For example, there aren’t really very many examples of high data rate digital beam formers in the COTS world at the moment,” Pollock said. “But we are trying to put a box around that piece of the problem and design…specs that anybody who has technology in that area can build that product.”
One of the highlights of the program, Pollock said, has been the ability to demonstrate the radar thanks to the availability of COTS tools for qualifying a subsystem..
“Because of that built-in test methodology, and the ability to check out individual subsystems, in the ONR program here with open architecture, we were able to field a radar system which correctly processed data from the array all the way back to the signal processor the first time we fielded the radar, which is practically unheard of,” Pollock said. “I attribute that to the amount of individual testing we were able to do around each individual component.”