Medfinansierad verksamhet - resultat och nytta för FoT

The phased array antenna based radar systems project (GUARD) and earlier phased array focused research projects financed by the Swedish Armed Forces have good experiences of both national and international project cooperation (by co-financing). A relatively small effort from FOI gives us the possibility to be part of the much larger total project activities, where for example planned FOI activities gets extended by the co-financed projects, achieved results and manufacturing costs are shared. In this report activities, experiences and benefits for our customer are described and discussed. The six cooperation (fully or partly co-financed by the GUARD-project (or earlier phased array antenna based projects at FOI)) projects given here are: the EU FP7-projects MEMS-4-MMIC, NANOTEC, AIRBEAM and INACHUS, the VINNOVA-project Multi Purpose Human Finder and the own financed EDA-project SPREWS. During these projects FOI have got insight in the state-of-the-art in fields such as circuit technologies (e.g. MEMS, SiGe, GaN), signal processing, system assessment and antenna design. For example subsystems for UAV-based radars at 35 GHz have been developed. Concepts for See-Thru applications at lower frequencies (1-2 GHz) and higher frequencies (94 GHz) have been studied by switch circuit designs (RFMEMS based) and antenna designs. Furthermore, experimental studies of Gallium Nitride (GaN) based transmit/receive modules for radar applications at X-band frequencies is included. At higher system levels the effect of hardware imperfections of the system performance has been evaluated. Overall, the studies indicate the potential of these technologies for improved radar sensors in terms of reduced sensor size, weight, power consumption and cost, which often are limiting factors, especially for small sensor platforms (e.g. UAVs). The network built up by the project cooperation includes a mix of academia, institutes and smaller and large industries, which gives us insight from different system levels and is an excellent way for us to increase our knowledge in the field. The connections to the European manufacturers of critical technologies (e.g. OMMIC, UMS) is included in the above and this dialogue is of extra importance for FOI in order to maintain a high level of knowledge in the field of radars. Economically, the project cooperation has contributed by a substantial added value to our economical funding in the radar reseach field. The total turn-over of the cofinanced projects are close to 472 Mkr, of which approximately 20 Mkr are funding in the radar field for FOI.