Making Fully Digital Beamforming for Radar and Electronic Warfare Applications a Reality

While the basic physics of beamforming were first identified more than a century ago, it wasn't until the past two decades that advances in supporting technology enabled the rapid expansion of the types of applications that can take advantage of this technology.

As early adopters of beamforming technology in the 1960s, aerospace and defense organizations have a lot of experience using the initial large-scale active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) for military radar tracking applications. As a result of the innovations led by military organizations for several decades, commercial applications such as weather detection and radio broadcasting were able to benefit from the use of beamforming technologies as well.