DARPA awards BAE Systems two awards under Wideband Adaptive RF Protection (WARP) program.

BAE Systems will design mechanisms for the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) that protect emerging wideband receivers from interference, enabling their use in contested and congested environments. DARPA awarded two contracts to BAE Systems totaling $5 million under the Wideband Adaptive RF Protection (WARP) program which is designed to develop wideband adaptive filtering and signal cancellation architectures to safeguard emerging wideband receivers against both external and self-interference.

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The Wideband Adaptive RF Protection (WARP) program seeks develop wideband adaptive filtering and signal cancellation architectures to protect emerging wideband receivers against both external and self-interference, ultimately enabling the use of wideband software-defined radios in contested and congested spectral environments (Picture source: BAE Systems)

Within the Department of Defense, radio frequency (RF) systems must operate within an increasingly crowded electromagnetic spectrum and contend with mission-compromising interference from friendly and hostile sources.

“The ability to control signal strength across the electromagnetic spectrum is critical to the robust operation of wideband RF electronics,” said Chris Rappa, product line director at BAE Systems’ FAST Labs™ research and development organization. “WARP signal filters and cancellers will sense and adapt to the electromagnetic environment through the intelligent control of adaptive hardware.”

The technical areas of the program focus on enhancing electronic warfare technology to improve adaptive control of electromagnetic spectrum – enabling allied forces to freely operate while denying that advantage to adversaries. Specifically, Technical Area 1 is focused on mitigating external interference and Technical Area 2 is focused on mitigating self-interference from co-located transmitters to enable same-frequency simultaneous transmit and receive, also known as STAR.

The WARP awards add to the advanced defense electronics and electronic warfare research and development portfolio and are based on many years of investment on various programs including T-MUSIC, CONverged Collaborative Elements for RF Task Operations (CONCERTO) and Radio Frequency Field Programmable Gate Arrays (RF-FPGA).