[Legacy Report] Engineering Complex Radar Systems

---

Address: Engineers Australia 11 National Circuit, Barton, ACT

Abstract: Radar technology is undergoing a slow revolution as high power transmitters transition from vacuum tube based technology to solid state and as antennas shift from passive mechanically moved structures to electronic beam steering phased array. This is complemented by the real time capabilities of massively parallel embedded logic and processing providing dynamic and in field programmable capabilities.

Many of these technological advances have recently been delivered to the Royal Australian Navy as part of the ANZAC ASMD upgrade program. This Australian developed solution has demanded the skills and innovation of teams across many engineering domains. These include, mechanical, thermal, antenna, electronics, computing, simulation, analysis, algorithm development, manufacturing and materials.

The functional and implementation complexity of such a system is best judged by a few simple scaling factors. The system continually captures and processes over half a terabyte of data per second; it has more than 14,000 individual antenna elements and thousands of individual executable programs and parameter sets. The final data presented to the operator is represented graphically by less than 100kBytes of data per second and this appears less than 100milliseconds after the data was acquired.

Short biography: Mr. David O’Connor, CEA Technologies Software Engineering Manager - Phased Array Radar Projects. David joined CEA Technologies in 1987. He has extensive experience in the development, integration and test, acceptance and through-life support of complex systems involving phased array radar technology, data fusion, tracking, ship classification, communications, modelling and simulation. He is a graduate of the Australian National University with a Master of Technology Management and Bachelor of Science (computer science).

---

---

---

---