Sandia National Labs FY20 LDRD Annual Report

FY20 ANNUAL REPORT

LDRD IMPACT STORY: Multi-mission radio frequency architecture

MISSION MOTIVATION: DOE national security applications benefit from radar capabilities that enable smarter sense, analyze, and respond cycles. LDRD CHALLENGE: Enable advanced real- time multi-mission sensors that can send/ receive/process arbitrary signals with large instantaneous bandwidth using multiple channels. In 2017, a Sandia LDRD team, led by PI Jacques Loui, sought to develop a multi-mission digital radar architecture to simplify and modularize a radar’s radio frequency frontend by replacing application-specific analog detection methodology with flexible and programmable digital signal processing. After a year of work,

they successfully obtained real-time digital- detection radar impulse response from a prototype and demonstrated multi-channel synchronization. With such positive results, the Sandia Multi- Mission Radio Frequency Architecture (MMRFA) LDRD team continued the effort into 2019 and demonstrated an ultra-wide-band multimission modular digital radar architecture that overcame limitations of single-application analog radar designs by leveraging commercial- off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware, existing/new firmware/software intellectual properties, and available radio frequency (RF) apertures. They demonstrated several Sandia firsts in real-time ultra-wideband sensing, including multi-channel

A high-resolution Digital Synthetic Aperture Radar image from the successful initial flight test in 2019.

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LABORATORY DIRECTED RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT