PR Newswire:
TEWKSBURY, Mass., April 13, 2015 /PRNewswire/ — In its first year, Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) has met all critical milestones in the development of the U.S. Navy’s AN/SPY-6(V) integrated Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR).
Since work officially began in January 2014, the Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase of the program – now 35 percent complete – has advanced in design, risk reduction and maturity, placing it on track for delivery to the Navy’s Flight III DDG 51 Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. DDG 51 Flight III is scheduled to begin construction in 2016.
“Our achievement of all plan milestones to date is a true testament to our experts, our well-established radar development infrastructure, and the collaborative working partnerships with the full government-industry team,” said Raytheon’s Kevin Peppe, vice president of Integrated Defense Systems’ Seapower Capability Systems business area. “Continuing on schedule, the AMDR program is on track to highlight and demonstrate current system and technology maturity at the upcoming system-critical design review–our next key validation and verification milestone.”
Along with the successful completion of all major contract design reviews to date, throughout the first year of EMD, the program has:
- Built a risk-reduction pilot array for hardware, software and integration testing at the company’s Near Field Range in Sudbury, Mass.
- Delivered the first of four ‘builds’ of working software in less than eight months; Build Two is more than 50% complete.
- Software tracked simulated, simultaneous Anti-Air Warfare and ballistic missile targets
- Completed the first Engineering Development Model production-representative Radar Modular Assembly (RMA); currently testing in pilot array
- Completed a functional SPY-6 variant, scaled down to a single RMA, actively tracking live targets using actual hardware and AMDR-derived software
- Completed and delivered the first set of external combat system interface definition language (IDL) to the Combat System Integration Working Group, which includes the Navy and Lockheed Martin
- Continued progress with radar array production, including the completion of:
- More than 45,000 Gallium Nitride (GaN) and Gallium Arsenide (GaAS)-based Monolithic Microwave Integrated Circuits
- More than 400 Transmit/Receive Modules; with more than 1,000 in progress
Raytheon has implemented an Agile development and management methodology for AMDR. This approach supports the ongoing hardware and software design verification, technology maturity, producibility, and risk-reduction imperatives – yielding benefits in productivity, quality and affordability.
About SPY-6(V) AMDR
SPY-6(V) is the next-generation integrated air and ballistic missile defense radar for the U.S. Navy, filling a critical capability gap for the surface fleet. It is the first truly scalable radar, built with radar building blocks (Radar Modular Assemblies) that can be grouped to form any size radar aperture, either smaller or larger than currently fielded radars. All cooling, power, command logic and software are scalable. This scalability could allow for new instantiations, such as back-fit on existing DDG 51 destroyers and installation on aircraft carriers, amphibious warfare ships, frigates, or the DDG 1000 class, without significant radar development costs.
Leveraging GaN technology to optimize power in a smaller size and using less space, power and cooling than older technology would require for the same performance, AMDR is a key enabler for the capability and performance enhancements of the new DDG 51 Flight III ship. SPY-6(V) for DDG 51 Flight III is designed with high operational availability and reliability to minimize overall ownership cost.
