The US Office of Naval Research (ONR) is seeking to develop an Affordable Common Radar Architecture (ACRA) to replace multiple legacy systems installed on US Navy surface ships.

The ACRA is an ONR Future Naval Capability (FNC) and is built upon ONR’s previous Digital Array Radar concept, focused on developing a modular, loosely-coupled system.

The open design will enable hardware and software reuse and will help to meet the US Navy’s future requirements in an affordable manner.

The radar’s architecture contains two separate antennas to control cost and improve upgradeability, and features a full-size receiver array and a reduced-size transmit array.

Work on the architecture, as well as the integration and demonstration activities associated with ACRA, is being carried out at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Dahlgren Division, Defense-Aerospace reported.