Northop Grumman announced Wednesday the successful first flight of its Electronically-Scanned Multifunction Reconfigurable Integrated Sensor (EMRIS) aboard a U.S. military aircraft. The development paves the way for the eventual deployment of new radar capabilities that will enable future jets to evade a wider range of threats.
And technology can change quickly as the threat landscape evolves.
EMRIS is an electronically scanned array (AESA), a technology that has been around since the 1960s but has become much more robust in recent years thanks to improvements in chip design and information technology. AESAs use computers to control radio waves and modulate frequency and power to better avoid detection and interference in radar systems.
However, these arrays do not evolve very quickly and are extremely difficult to update or modify once they are in service. This is a big problem for the military because digital electronic systems for finding or detecting waveforms have evolved rapidly in the commercial world. This is one of the reasons why DARPA launched a program called Arrays at Commercial Timescales (ACT) in 2014.
“A system with static RF or analog capabilities cannot take advantage of advances in underlying digital electronics and will therefore have fixed performance in an evolving threat space. It is imperative to define a path to shorter design cycles and infield updates,” says a DARPA BAA on the program. The goal of the program is new phased array antennas that can be modified at the pace of digital electronics.
The EMIRS technology emerged from that program. “By applying the flexibility of a digital AESA, EMRIS can perform multiple functions simultaneously, including radar, electronic warfare and communications,” Northrop said in a statement on Tuesday.
EMIRS is the result of the company’s significant investments in the development of new semiconductors with manufacturing facilities in California and Maryland. Defense One visited the Maryland facility in February.
During the visit, Vern Boyle, vice president of the Northrop Grumman Microelectronics Center, described how chip design and manufacturing are different in the defense industry compared to the commercial world. The economics are far more challenging for defense companies because Northrop has to produce very small numbers of very specific chips. This means they don’t take advantage of the huge manufacturing facilities that companies like Taiwan’s TSMC use to make lots of chips that aren’t very different.
“Go to Intel or TSMC (chip fab). They make millions and millions of chips. We need chips in smaller quantities and custom chips… So a commercial fab might make one or two products. We make 90 products in our fab.”
In its two manufacturing plants, Northrop produces about five million chips annually for about 60 different products, he said.
But new technologies such as digital twinning and modeling would help accelerate the pace at which Northrop can produce new, highly customized chips for aircraft, satellites or other military platforms, he said.
“We use digital modeling, digital twins, to design the chip and understand how it integrates down to the next level of packaging, down to the board level, down to the package level. So when we make these custom parts, we can get it right the first time, right? And that reduces cost and shortens the schedule.”
