Essex Corporation Announces Completion of Advanced Optical Processor Field Testing
biz.yahoo.com
Monday July 10, 11:32 am ET
COLUMBIA, Md., July 10 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Essex Corporation (Nasdaq: KEYW) announces completion of field testing of the radar Advanced Optical Processor (AOP) with a range radar. Testing involved the verification of processor interfaces and operations as well as the advanced waveform quality produced by the AOP. Successful completion of these tests was the last critical step in demonstrating that the AOP can be integrated with a radar while collecting and processing advanced arbitrary waveforms in real time.
The range radar testing included collection and processing of three waveform signal types to demonstrate arbitrary waveform capability. Various ground-based, air and orbiting space targets were imaged with these waveforms. The AOP supports high resolution processing necessary for target discrimination and kill assessment by enabling the use of true arbitrary wideband waveforms. The selected architecture combines the advantages of both optical signal processing for the front-end receiver and high-speed digital signal processing for the real-time processing. Other applications include an Early Warning (EW) radar receiver, Electro-magnetic Interference (EMI) detector and identifier, and an Adjunct radar imager for EMI environments.
"The Essex AOP brings exciting new capabilities to missile defense applications with its speed and ability to process advanced waveforms," according to Leonard Moodispaw, CEO and President of Essex. "The AOP system today is an advanced prototype system, packaged as a rack-mounted subsystem. Now that the field tests are successfully completed, we have begun working with our customer and the leading radar system vendors to explore the integration of these advanced capabilities into the next generation of existing and emerging radar systems."
AOP is an ultra-wide bandwidth optoelectronic processor that enables increased radar resolution and threat assessment. The system has several advantages compared to all-digital solutions including the elimination of wideband analog-to-digital (A/D) converters and significant computational software. Development of the AOP was started under various Federal Government awards, including a Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) award in 2001, with the goal of developing a real-time radar imager that supports advanced waveforms with an open architecture with applicability to many types of radar systems. Essex is also developing under a separate SBIR award a prototype AOP with ten times the imaging range, to be demonstrated later this year. |
