DARPA's WARP program to protect wideband RF systems
NewsJanuary 24, 2020
WASHINGTON. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) introduced its Wideband Adaptive RF Protection (WARP) program, which seeks to enhance protections for wideband receivers operating in congested and contested electromagnetic (EM) environments.
The goal is to develop wideband, adaptive filters and analog signal cancellers that selectively cancel externally generated interference signals, like adversarial jamming, and self-generated interference signals (like those created by a radio’s own transmitter) to protect wideband digital radios from saturation.
To address external interference, WARP will explore wideband tunable filters that can sense the EM environment and adapt to maintain the receiver’s dynamic range without decreasing signal sensitivity or bandwidth. The research will look at filter architectures and packaging to achieve the program’s target metrics.
WARP will also address self-generated inference with the development of adaptive, analog signal cancellers intended to reduce the transmit leakage before the wideband digital receiver.
