Discussing AOC, electronic warfare designs with Mike Jones of Analog Devices
StoryDecember 10, 2024
This week the 61st Annual AOC International Symposium & Convention is being held at the Gaylord Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland. Electronic warfare (EW), spectrum dominance, and signals intelligence (SIGINT) and the RF, microwave, and signal-processing technologies behind them are key components of both the conference and the exhibition. The theme of this year’s event is “Electromagnetic Spectrum Warfare – The Great Power Competition.”
For a preview of AOC event and a look at the RF and microwave trends in EW and military communications, applications, I sat down with Mike Jones, a Senior Systems Integration Engineer at Analog Devices, Inc. (ADI). Following are several excerpts:
McHALE: What are systems designers of electronic warfare systems looking from in RF and microwave components? What requirements are driving new systems?
JONES: To meet the increasing demand for software configurable front ends, system designers desire both wideband frequency tuning ranges as well as wide instantaneous bandwidths while still maintaining or otherwise shrinking the overall RF/microwave front-end footprint. This wideband nature also sets forth challenging requirements that allow configurability within these bands in the form of gain control, frequency selectivity, and fast response times.
McHALE: The theme of this year’s AOC Symposium is electromagnetic spectrum warfare. What does that mean from your perspective?
JONES: Efficiently leveraging the available electromagnetic spectrum is paramount to most defense systems. Having the ability to be agile in terms of frequency of operation, gain profiles at these frequencies, and the spatial distribution of these frequencies at any given time is often required. ADI provides solutions in this domain at both the IC [integrated circuit] level as well as at the subsystem level.
McHALE: How do you enable success in this concept at the RF and microwave level? What are the performance drivers? Be as specific as possible.
JONES: Analog Devices now integrates historically disparate functions such as tunable filters, digital step attenuators, mixers, and gain stages into single monolithic multifunction RFICs [radio-frequency integrated circuits]. This integration shrinks the overall RF front-end footprint while allowing reconfigurable and agile RF/microwave control mechanisms, which allows customers maximum flexibility with their designs. Leveraging the vertical integration within ADI from the variety of RFICs within its portfolio (PLL synthesizer ICs, power distribution network ICs, RF/microwave multifunction ICs and RF analog-to-digital/digital-to-analog converters), ADI is also providing commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) subsystem designs in the form of software-defined radios (SDRs) and system-on-modules (SOMs).
McHALE: What does ADI expect to showcase at AOC this week?
JONES: We plan to showcase a handful of our wideband RF front ends to 55 GHz as well as our wideband and narrowband SOMs and SDRs and other subsystem-level solutions.
The demonstrations include:
- Wideband RF Front-End Demo with Apollo MxFE: The wideband RF front-end demo with Apollo MxFE technology addresses many wideband architectural challenges by showcasing a complete RF front-end solution.
- Jupiter + Navassa: The Jupiter RF agile SDR-in-a-box platform supports SDR applications from early concept to real-world use cases. This demo shows how it provides flexibility in evaluating and prototyping across different environments and how multiple systems can be synchronized for large MIMO [multiple-input and multiple-output] applications.
- Apollo MxFE: Direct RF Sampling at 40 GS/sec: In EW and communication intelligence (COMINT) systems, there has long been a desire for the continuous scanning capability across 2 GHz to 18 GHz, all in a single Nyquist. This demo shows how on-chip digital signal processing resources can be leveraged to cancel image artifacts that appear across the Nyquist boundary.
- ADSY1100: A 4-Channel Transmit/Receive, 0.1 GHz to 20 GHz 3UVPX Tuner + Digitizer + Processor System on Module: This demo shows features a 4-channel transmit, 4-channel receive 3U VPX tuner plus digitizer platform all contained within a single 1-inch-pitch chassis, developed leveraging a multichannel high speed digitizer integrated circuit (IC).
