IN Brief:
- Raytheon has secured a $22.6m US defence contract for STORM radar software development.
- The work supports transmit multiplexing and multimission operation for the SPY-6 naval radar family.
- Software-defined radar is becoming central to naval sensing as spectrum congestion and mission demands increase.
Raytheon has received a $22.6m US Department of Defense and Office of Naval Research contract to develop STORM radar software for the SPY-6 family of naval radars.
STORM, or Subarray Transmit Orthogonality for Receive Multiplexing, is designed to expand transmit multiplexing across SPY-6 radar architectures. The work will support more flexible use of radar elements, enabling a single radar system to support multiple missions at the same time.
The contract places software-defined capability at the centre of a radar family already shaped by advanced RF electronics, signal processing, and modular hardware. SPY-6 is built around radar modular assemblies, allowing the radar to scale across different ship classes and mission requirements. Software that unlocks more flexible use of those apertures can increase capability without requiring a completely new sensor architecture.
Naval platforms face a denser electromagnetic environment than previous generations of shipborne radar were built to handle. Air, missile, surface, and asymmetric threats have to be detected and tracked while radar systems coexist with communications, electronic warfare, datalinks, and other emitters. Aperture management, mode scheduling, waveform agility, and processing resource allocation are now central to radar design.
The electronics behind that shift extend through the full signal chain. Multimission radar performance depends on RF front ends, high-power transmit devices, low-noise receive paths, high-speed digitisation, timing, embedded processing, thermal control, and deterministic software behaviour. Even when the headline development is software, the capability depends on whether the underlying hardware can support independent subarray operation, fast processing, and stable performance under demanding duty cycles.
Radar component development is moving in the same direction. Beamforming IC work such as Tower and Axiro’s SiGe BFICs for defence radar and front-end protection devices such as Teledyne’s wideband limiter for radar and ESM receivers show how radar performance is being distributed across device technology, aperture design, receiver protection, and software control.
STORM also reflects a wider move away from single-purpose radar operation. Modern naval sensors are expected to support air and missile defence, surface surveillance, electronic protection, track quality management, and coordination with combat systems. Those functions compete for aperture time, processing capacity, and spectrum discipline, requiring software that can manage trade-offs without degrading mission-critical performance.
For radar engineers, transmit multiplexing raises demanding questions around isolation, timing accuracy, calibration, thermal loading, signal fidelity, and algorithmic control. The ability to treat radar elements more independently can create more flexible operating modes, but it also increases the burden on software validation and system-level characterisation.
The contract’s value sits not only in the software deliverable but in the path it creates for capability growth across an existing radar family. If a sensor architecture can gain mission flexibility through software upgrades, naval operators can extend performance without the disruption and cost of replacing major hardware. For the electronics supply chain, the direction is clear: radar capability is becoming a co-design problem across RF hardware, embedded compute, software, and spectrum-aware operation.
