Integrated RF sensors for electronic warfare applications

This paper describes a research effort to develop integrated RF sensors for various electronic warfare applications. The immediate application is to enable a micro air vehicle (MAV) to detect and home in on a radar or other RF emitter. Thus the sensors must be able to detect RF signals in frequency bands of interest, identify RF emitters of interest, and provide bearing information to the selected RF emitter. The sensor must weigh no more than several grams in order to fly aboard an MAV. To fabricate such sensors, we are developing compact circuits to detect wide-band RF signals, to identify RF emitters, and to perform direction finding (DF). We are implementing such sensors in CMOS to keep production costs low.