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The US Office of Naval Research has been awarded a contract to streamline the production of transmit/receive (TR) modules for the US Navy’s next-generation SPY-6 radar systems.
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This contract is part of a US Navy ManTech project from Penn State University Applied Research Laboratory’s Electronics Manufacturing Center of Excellence to deliver cost-savings for the US Navy across the life cycle of the SPY-6 radar.
SPY-6 is the US Navy’s next-generation family of radars which performs air and missile defence on several classes of ships including the Flight III Arleigh Burke Class destroyers, the Gerald R Ford Class aircraft carriers and the planned DDG(X).
They enable ships to simultaneously detect, track and discriminate air, surface and ballistic missile targets, providing a 360-degree integrated air and missile defence for ships.
Colin Whelan, president of Advanced Technology at Raytheon, welcomed this contract, saying, “TR modules are a key component in many of the military’s critical sensing systems. These manufacturing advancements will greatly benefit future capabilities and can be implemented on other US Navy and Department of Defense programs.”
The four variants of SPY-6 use common hardware and software and their construction is modular, making it more reliable and less expensive to maintain, with manufacturing advancements further increasing performance while reducing overall production costs.
SPY-6 radars provide the US Navy with a fully integrated radar capability, meaning they can defend against ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, hypersonic missiles, hostile aircraft and surface ships simultaneously.
They offer many advantages over legacy radars, such as greater detection range, increased sensitivity and more accurate discrimination.
Each radar is built with individual “building blocks” called radar modular assemblies (RMA), with each RMA a self-contained radar antenna in a 2’x2’x2’ box.
The RMAs are then stacked together to fit the mission requirements of any ship, making the SPY-6 family the Navy’s first truly scalable radars.
Work on this contract is being conducted in Andover, Massachusetts, with the new SPY-6 radio frequency transmit/receive modules expected to be delivered in 2026–27.
