Radar Processing

Radar technology is used in a wide variety of applications ranging from aircraft to shipboard to ground based. What is consistent in all cases is that the processor in a radar system is a very high performance, multi-stage solution often pushing the envelope on processing, data bandwidth and thermal density. Curtiss-Wright has a solid history of providing leading technology for all stages of the processor, satisfying the complex processing, data movement and environmental constraints for a wide variety of applications.

For the data ingest portion of a radar processor Curtiss-Wright offers a wide range of FPGA products, such as the XF07 or the CHAMP-FX4, that can not only interface standard inputs such as sFPDP and Fibre Channel but can also accommodate custom interfaces that might exist in some applications. These products provide not only the I/O flexibility, but also DSP purposed FPGAs to facilitate pre-processing algorithms. Once the data is acquired, data is moved to the signal processing portion of the processor which are often solutions that must maximize processing performance in the smallest number of cards possible. Curtiss-Wright offers solutions such as our legacy Power Architecture based CHAMP-AV6 to our latest generation Intel based CHAMP-AV9 providing over a teraflop of processing in single card slot. Data is then moved to the data processing stage to package and send for display and/or recording. Tying all of these stages together is centralized switching technology for the data plane (SRIO, 40GigE, InfiniBand, etc.) and control plane (Gigabit Ethernet) as well as multi-processing and data movement middleware facilitating multi-node debugging, event analysis, system management and network fabric analysis.

Curtiss-Wright has taken all of these high performance, high power components and packaged them into integrated HPEC processing solutions ranging from 1000-1600W. To accommodate the power density in the harsh environments these processor have to endure, Curtiss-Wright offers a range of thermal management solutions including VITA 48.5 Air Flow Through solutions, Liquid cooled enclosures and more.