DARPA awards BAE Systems two awards under WARP program

Air April 16, 2021

BAE Systems is to design mechanisms for the US 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 totalling $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.

Within the US 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 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 defence 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).

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