Sonar signal processing job using commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) equipment goes to Lockheed Martin
WASHINGTON, 9 March 2015.Sonar signal processing experts at Lockheed Martin Corp. will upgrade sonar signal processing capability in six U.S. Navy submarines under terms of a $29.2 million contract modification announced Friday.
Officials of the Naval Sea Systems Command in Washington are asking experts at the Lockheed Martin Mission System sand Training segment in Manassas, Va., to provide purchase Technology Insertion (TI14) system upgrades for six ships including spares and pre-cable kits, as part of the Acoustics-Rapid COTS Insertion (A-RCI) program.
A-RCI is a sonar system that integrates and improves towed array, hull array, sphere array, and other ship sensor processing, through rapid insertion of commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) hardware and software, such as commercial blade servers.
The contract modification -- part of an original potential $2 billion contract awarded to Lockheed Martin in January 2011 -- is for A-RCI and common acoustics processing for the U.S. submarine fleet and for foreign military sales. The six submarines involved in this sonar signal processing contract modification were not specified.
For the past 17 years Lockheed Martin sonar experts have been harvesting the most advanced and most promising COTS digital signal processing (DSP) equipment -- from embedded servers, field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), to powerful general-purpose processors) -- to achieve the most advanced submarine sonar signal processing at the most reasonable cost.
The A-RCI program is among the most visible U.S. military acknowledgements that COTS technology delivers the most capability at the least cost for defense-related embedded digital signal processing technology.
The A-RCI program, as its name suggests, seeks to move the latest COTS DSP technology into submarine signal processing systems aboard Virginia-, Seawolf-, and Los Angeles-class fast attack submarines, as well as aboard Ohio-class missile submarines on a regular basis to keep pace with commercial embedded computing developments.
A-RCI is an open-architecture sonar system that Navy officials intend to maintain an advantage in acoustic detection of threat submarines, using legacy sonar sensors. The program regularly refreshes central processors with COTS computer technology and software. A-RCI processors handle data from the submarine’s spherical array, hull array, wide aperture array, high-frequency arrays, and towed arrays.
Related: Lockheed Martin nets $127.7 million contract to upgrade submarine sonar signal processing
An open-systems architecture makes the most of commercial processing development, and enables submarine signal processing systems to use complex algorithms that Navy-developed sonar systems such as the AN/BSY-1 and AN/BSY-2 systems cannot not use.
Using COTS technology enables onboard computing power to grow at nearly the same rate as commercial industry, and facilitates regular updates to submarine sonar-processing software and hardware with minimal disruption to submarine scheduling, Navy officials say.
On this contract modification Lockheed Martin will do the work in Manassas, Va. and Clearwater, Fla., and should be finished by September 2018.
For more information contact Lockheed Martin Mission Systems and Training online at www.lockheedmartin.com/us/mst, or Naval Sea Systems Command at www.navsea.navy.mil.
John Keller | Editor
John Keller is editor-in-chief of Military & Aerospace Electronics magazine, which provides extensive coverage and analysis of enabling electronic and optoelectronic technologies in military, space, and commercial aviation applications. A member of the Military & Aerospace Electronics staff since the magazine's founding in 1989, Mr. Keller took over as chief editor in 1995.
