From black boxes to building blocks: SOSA’s push for faster radar and EW upgrades

Story

February 06, 2026

A strike package pushes into contested airspace and the threat picture changes mid-mission: A new emitter lights up, the jamming pattern shifts, and the warning tones in the cockpit start coming sooner than they should. The aircraft barely makes it out of a hairy situation, and the debrief is blunt: There’s a gap in the radar/electronic warfare (EW) chain, and it could take months or even years to fix. But that timeline is starting to shorten.

In the past, fixing gaps in radar and EW coverage meant inserting new processing and new hardware, all of this often on a legacy architecture that can turn into chassis rework, custom wiring, and painful requalification while the threat keeps evolving. The industry is pushing to break that cycle by standardizing how sensor systems are built so that upgrades can be inserted as building blocks instead of rebuilding the box.

That’s where the Sensor Open Systems Architecture, or SOSA, Technical Stan­dard is aimed. Instead of custom backplanes and vendor-specific interfaces that lock a program into a single design path, the SOSA Technical Standard makes radar and EW systems easier to update by defining how hardware and software pieces fit together.

The goal is to simplify upgrades: Swap in better processing, add capability, or replace a weak link without redesigning the chassis from scratch.

The promise of SOSA alignment

Radar and EW programs have often paid for the same integration work again and again. Small differences in how boards connect – or how data moves between them – can turn every refresh into a redesign. The SOSA Technical Standard is meant to cut that friction, setting a shared blueprint by defining the architecture itself.

“SOSA provides a reference architecture model to support various mission threads,” says Ken Grob, director of embedded technologies at Elma Electronic (Fremont, California). “The standard addresses SOSA modules that describe the logical building blocks used to implement a specific sensor type.”

One practical pain point SOSA alignment targets is backplane variation, where “almost the same” pinouts keep parts from being truly interchangeable. Jay Grandin, vice president of product development at Annapolis Micro Systems (Annapolis, Maryland), says aligning with SOSA tightens that up: “SOSA has chosen board slot profiles without user-defined pins which increases interoperability between different modules as there is no variation in backplane interface pinout.” (Figure 1.)

[Figure 1 | Annapolis Micro Systems’ WP3H20 3U OpenVPX switch combines UltraScale+ processing and an Intel SBC with high-density VITA 91 backplane connectivity, designed for low-latency EW, jamming, and radar. Image via Annapolis Micro Systems.]

The benefit is long-term upgradeability, Grandin adds. “This allows for fielded systems to be more reliably upgraded without chassis redesign, ensuring longer lifetime, and more frequent hardware upgrades to enhance capability.”

The big value of the SOSA standard when it comes to radar and EW systems is how quickly technology can evolve as a result, allowing industry to keep pace with the threat, says Dinesh Jain, FPGA product manager for Abaco Systems (Huntsville, Alabama).

“There’s a renewed sense of urgency as AI [artificial intelligence] models are being trained to identify vulnerabilities in radar and EW systems to both stress-test the limits of its capabilities and areas for improvement,” Jain says. “When vulnerabilities are identified, it becomes a high priority to resolve them as quickly as possible. A system designed to SOSA open standards allows programs to quickly implement upgrades with the best solution while minimizing impact to the system architecture.”

That promise – faster upgrades with less disruption – sets the bar for what comes next: making SOSA aligned upgrades work in systems that are already operating near their limits.

The culture change

Making SOSA upgrades work is easier said than done, however: Because SOSA upgrades ask teams to commit to a stricter framework up front, it can feel like a culture change in an industry that has long worked a different way.

The standard rewards teams that accept guardrails early: SOSA alignment calls for consistent interfaces, defined profiles, and a more disciplined approach to how hardware and software are put together. That work style can feel restrictive to engineers used to optimizing every connection for a single platform. It also comes with a practical ramp-up, Grob says.

“Initially there is a learning curve associated with implementation of a new design using the SOSA Reference Architecture, and in obtaining SOSA aligned hardware elements, chassis, and power supplies,” he notes.

For radar and EW, the tougher issue is planning for growth, Jain asserts. Designs that look fine at first can hit a wall when the spectrum expands and the data load spikes.

“In my opinion, the biggest technical challenge is building in resource overhead to the initial set of program requirements, especially when it relates to EW and radar,” Jain says. “The front-end spectrum of interest is rapidly expanding.

“It was only a few years ago where the upper limit of the spectrum of interest was 8 GHz,” he continues. “Now, next-gen EW systems are requiring 18 GHz and beyond across many RF channels.”

Aligning with the SOSA standard can make upgrades easier, but it can’t rescue a platform that runs out of capacity.

“This is not a SOSA shortcoming but rather about planning as far ahead as possible and building resource headroom into the system,” Jain says. (Figure 2.)

[Figure 2 | The Abaco Systems SBC3801 is a SOSA aligned 3U VPX secure single-board computer with SecurShield technology, providing a programmable hardware root of trust for mission systems such as SDRs, sensors, and crypto processing. Image via Abaco Systems.]

Keeping pace with the threat

But if planning is done right, SOSA offers a huge value to helping industry keep up with threats that continue to rapidly evolve.

“In order to keep pace with threats, systems need to be built so that they can be implemented quickly and can be upgraded,” Grob says, noting that SOSA aligned upgrades support an ecosystem where programs can draw from proven modules instead of starting from zero. “Available building blocks like SDRs [software-defined radios], Ethernet switches, CPUs, and data-acquisition cards help by allowing designers to pull standard hardware that is SOSA aligned off the shelf.”

Grandin connects the same idea to faster refresh cycles in the field: “By allowing more frequent hardware upgrade cycles due to standardization, SOSA ensures that systems can take advantage of the latest available hardware as quickly as possible to tackle evolving threats with enhanced capabilities.”

SOSA also changes how suppliers invest in future parts, especially as EW pushes higher in frequency. “Using the push towards 18 GHz as an example, the development resources to bring such a product to market is quite high and requires a substantial resource investment,” Jain says.

SOSA gives vendors more confidence that the market will be there, he notes: “Knowing that the product is being designed to SOSA, and knowing that new programs are embracing SOSA, multiple different developers can invest with confidence that their product have multiple opportunities to procure design wins.”

That combination – easier insertion plus stronger supplier investment – also shows up in two places program managers care about every day: cost and schedule.

On time and on budget

Radar and EW systems are expensive partly because integration is expensive. When every program has to wire up its own set of interfaces and prove every connection from scratch, cost rises and schedules stretch. SOSA aims to reduce that custom work by pushing reuse.

With SOSA, “costs can be lowered through the availability and re-use of standard components provided by an ecosystem of suppliers that produce standard hardware elements (PICs),” Grob says. “This also extends to software that runs on standard SOSA aligned hardware and API framework.” (Figure 3.)

[Figure 3 | The Elma Electronic CMFF field-deployable chassis with SAVE tray is SOSA aligned and built for C5ISR, EW, and EO/IR applications, supporting rapid technology insertion in a rugged, SWaP-optimized package. Image via Elma Electronic.]

He adds that a modular approach supports smaller upgrade steps: “The approach supports incremental upgrades to be developed and tested to quickly support rapid upgrade and deployment.”

Grandin says standardization improves plug-and-play integration, which directly cuts time and labor. “By limiting options and standardizing existing options across hardware, interface protocols, and software interfaces, plug-and-play capability is drastically improved. This significantly reduces integration cost and time.”

Jain maintains that market pressure also speeds delivery. “With multiple developers investing to deliver a SOSA [aligned] solution, there’s a ‘time-to-market’ mentality which means program sponsors can have access to the latest technology earlier and quickly qualify them to counter evolving threats,” he says.

Those benefits only matter if the SOSA approach continues to spread across radar and EW programs.

Growing adoption

Fortunately for advocates, adoption of the SOSA Technical Standard has accelerated, especially in new programs. At the same time, older systems remain widely deployed, and the ecosystem still needs clearer ways to prove compliance and handle system-wide needs like security and management.

Grob says the effort has been underway for “about a decade,” and the vendor base has broadened across the hardware stack.

“The hardware ecosystem has developed with many companies now de­signing embedded board-level products that are aligned with the SOSA standards,” he says. “Other companies are designing backplanes, chassis managers, power supplies, and chassis that are SOSA aligned.”

From Grandin’s company’s view, the SOSA approach is already the default for new work – and it is starting to pull older programs forward, too.

“Nearly all new projects we see now are SOSA aligned and all of our new products are SOSA aligned,” he says. “Even older programs are starting to upgrade backplanes to take advantage of the SOSA ecosystem.”

Jain has also noticed the transition is showing up more often in program requirements, even while legacy systems remain common. “The transition from legacy to SOSA is real,” Jain notes. “It is common to see SOSA [alignment] as a requirement in RFPs for new programs.”

On the supply side, Jain says that new product roadmaps are tracking toward SOSA aligned building blocks. He adds that work is also continuing on RF-focused interoperability: “In addition to SOSA, we are seeing more interest in MORA [Modular Open RF Architecture], which standardizes low-latency RF data communication between boards from different vendors.”

Taken together, the message is straightforward: Aligning with the SOSA Technical Standard is becoming the common baseline for radar and EW upgrades, with growing supplier support. The remaining work is less about selling the idea and more about making alignment easier to prove – and making the full system stack, including security and management, as repeatable as the hardware building blocks the SOSA approach is built on.