18 Oct 2013 - The U.S. Navy has chosen Raytheon to build its Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR), a next-generation defensive system for its Arleigh Burke-class destroyers. The radar significantly increases ships' ability to detect ballistic missiles, which are proliferating around the world, as well as air and surface targets. "The threats that AMDR is designed to counter require leap-ahead technology that Raytheon is ready to deliver," said Raytheon's Kevin Peppe, vice president of Seapower Capability Systems. Raytheon's radar is highly scalable, allowing it to fit any ship or mission. The radar features digital beamforming, which provides unique capability to perform wide-area surveillance while providing high precision with multiple, simultaneous radar beams. The system also has radar resource scheduler capabilities that enable it to perform multiple missions simultaneously while maintaining an even demand on the ship's prime power system. That's a critical feature for the modern Navy. "Our AMDR solution benefits from decades of radar development and integration experience," Peppe said. The design, he said, "will pay dividends in its adaptability, affordability and ability to meet emerging threats for years to come." Raytheon builds upon decades of experience designing active phased-array radars, each of which uses hundreds or thousands of individual transmitters per radar face to steer precision signals electronically. They include the Navy's SPY-3, Dual Band Radar and Cobra Judy Replacement programs, the Army's AN/TPY-2 missile-defense radar, the radar-carrying JLENS blimps and the F/A-18 APG-79 and Raytheon Advanced Combat Radar for the U.S. Air Force. The company has produced more than 1.8 million transmit/receive modules, the individual elements that make up the transmitter of an active electronically scanned array radar. Raytheon also has decades of experience working with adaptive beamforming: shaping, steering or changing the strength of radar signals for different uses. The company is also the industry leader in production of high-performance gallium nitride, a material that can generate five times the radio energy density of previous technologies.

• published: 19 Oct 2013
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