The Office of Naval Research (ONR) has several projects showcasing its pursuit of new open architecture technologies, including the Integrated Topside (InTop) innovative naval prototype (INP) program that has ONR’s Chief beaming about the possibility of getting radar antennas off ships for good.

“Integrated Topside is the system that I’m really excited about,” Rear Adm. Nevin Carr recently said during the opening keynote address at Defense Daily‘s 3rd Annual Open Architecture Summit in Washington, D.C. “This is a real success story, not only for the technical details but for the business cooperation [among] several industry sources and cooperative arrangements set up the way a program ought to be,” he added.

InTop is an integrated, multi-function, multi-beam topside aperture construct that has modular open radio frequency (RF) architecture and software defined functionality. It is also designed to synchronize and optimize RF functions for mission support and electro-magnetic interference (EMI) mitigation.

ONR aims to develop a scalable family of electronic warfare (EW), radar, and communications capabilities that will dominate the RF spectrum and support multiple classes of ships and other Navy platforms, Carr said.

The nature of the open RF architecture itself will encourage innovation incentives throughout the total life cycle, cutting down on obsolescence and boosting the industrial base, he said. “We’re getting lots of cooperation from multiple partners who bring good ideas to the table, and contract that is set up so it can flow very cleanly into production,” Carr added.

“The next carrier you see is not going to look exactly like [graphic renditions of a futuristic aircraft carrier ‘island’ superstructure], but pieces of this are flowing into programs–it’s that open, and it’s that flexible,” Carr said. “In a nutshell, imagine getting rid of all antennas on a ship.”

Ships incorporating InTop advances would perform all their electromagnetic propagation through a small number of scaled apertures, managed through a back end resource allocation manager, he said.

Requests for resources to accomplish various RF functions, such as radar, EW, and communications would be prioritized, and then resources assigned to accomplish the function. The topside would be continually optimized to meet the highest priority needs at any given time.

InTop plans to reduce the number of topside apertures present on Navy ships through the use of the integrated arrays. In the past, the topside design approach was based on developing separate systems and associated antennas for each individual RF function. That led to a significant increase in topside antennas. This increase contributed to problems with EMI, radar cross-section (RCS) and the overall performance of critical ship EW and communication functions.

Carr said that there was “plenty of spectrum out there” and that by sensing in real time operators could find the holes that they want to use and the signals they want to exploit.

By treating the entire spectrum like an “ocean” and a battlespace with a combat system, one can manage it in time, Carr said. “So you introduce the time link and suddenly you really open up the spectrum. It’s a great example of an open architecture approach, and an open business approach.”

Carr said the InTop effort would do a lot of good for ships, with carriers and other surface programs drawing from the solutions. “Someday I want to see radar antennas off ships,” he added.

Other benefits include reducing topside weight, improving ship stability, and decreasing RCS. Optimized aperture placement along with space, weight, and power improvements will provide more capability per ship, Carr said.

InTop system monitoring also provides potential for new concepts of operations within the available RF spectrum by controlling EMI and increasing RF availability.

InTop builds off of a past ONR effort, the Advanced Multi-Function RF Concept (AMRFC), which was a proof-of-principle demonstration that showed the feasibility of multi-beam, multi-function apertures capable of simultaneously supporting EW, communications, and radar functions in transmit and receive arrays. The AMRFC test bed also provided a modular architecture where interfaces were sufficiently defined between units–arrays, signal processing, and resource manager–such that systems developed by different companies and government labs could be integrated and work together in one overall system.

Bids for the Navy’s InTop Task Order 3 competition, exploring how to combine apertures and antennas on surface ships, were turned in at the end of August, and companies were hoping for a contract award by the end of the year (Defense Daily, Sep. 2). Among those submitting bids were Lockheed Martin [LMT], Northrop Grumman [NOC] and several other unidentified companies.

Carr said that ONR has been receiving great support from the Chief of Naval Operations Information Dominance (N2/N6) directorate. “Now we need to keep thinking in terms of how open architecture and these kinds of systems and business models can help us by increasing capability through the total lifecycle cost of a ship,” he added.