Design of a Rugged Radiating Panel Assembly with High Reliability

Reliability is one of the key aspects in any kind of radar design and any failure of the system or sub-system can be critical. This problem particularly becomes severe for huge aperture radars where even a failure at Line Replaceable Unit (LRU) level may cause a system failure. An important radar system considered in this paper is a radiating panel assembly. It is an active aperture array of thousands of radiating elements interfaced with Dual Transmit Receive (TR) modules. The TR modules are governed by a hierarchical Beam steering network which generates the control signals and also provides the steering direction. There are power supply modules which are meant for sourcing the power to each individual LRUs. Therefore, the radiating panel assembly may be conceptualized to be an interconnection of system of systems. A rugged design should cater for prevention of failure of this multi-disciplinary system involving RF, digital controls and Power. In this paper we highlight the design philosophy for prevention of system failure and highlight all the mechanisms incorporated for the same. The approach is modular and scalable and can be adapted for any hybrid system with huge physical apertures.