Multifunction Maritime Radar and RF Systems—Technology Challenges and Areas of Development

Modern multifunctional radars (MFRs) offer extremely capable radio frequency (RF) front ends although their role is mostly limited to radar. Expanding the role of a multifunctional radar into a multifunctional radio frequency system (MFRFS), incorporating functions such as wireless communications and electronic warfare, has the potential to offer significant benefits. Technologies such as direct RF digitization, AI resource management, and high bandwidth amplifiers could enable a future MFRFS to fulfil these functions. Multifunctionality must be a key design driver when procuring MFRFSs; however, this runs counter to the traditional approach of requiring an assured minimum performance of a single function—while a particular system based around an individual function could potentially outperform the MFRFS, the overall performance across all functions should be better than the performance of a collection of individual systems.