Raytheon Co. has secured an $11 million, a contract from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory for the research and development of Millimeter-Wave Digital Arrays (MIDAS) program, according to a statement put out by the U.S. Department of Defense.

Raytheon Co., has been awarded an $11,532,469, competitive, cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the research and development of Millimeter-Wave Digital Arrays (MIDAS) Defense Advanced Research Projects Activity program.

The contractor will address the MIDAS program goals through innovations in digital tile architecture and integrated, scalable apertures with groundbreaking transmit and receive components.

Work will be performed in El Segundo, California, and is expected to be completed by Nov. 4, 2020.

The programme seeks to create a common digital array tile that will enable multi-beam directional communications and help solve the adaptive beamforming problem.

The program is geared toward finding a common digital array tile for performing multiple-beam directional communications at millimeter-wave frequencies. The plan is to move mobile military communications to the millimeter-wave frequency region (above 30 GHz), with research focusing on reducing the size and power consumption of digital millimeter-wave transceivers.

The use of element-level digital beamforming in phased-array antennas has made it possible to use multiple receive and transmit beams in multiple directions simultaneously to reduce node discovering time and improve network throughput.

The MIDAS program is focused on two key technical areas: the development of the silicon integrated circuits (ICs) needed for the core transceiver of the array tile; and the development of wideband antennas, millimeter-wave transmit/receive (T/R) components, and the integration of the various components needed to enable the use of this millimeter-wave technology across a number of different applications.

Anticipated applications include tactical line-of-sight communications as well as satellite communications (satcom).