Thread: Can AESA be jammed?

Originally Posted by highsea

You misinterpret my comment.

Nothing wrong with the desire to learn, but fishing for sensitive material on classified technologies is not appropriate on public forums. That includes pretty much everything in the ECM/EW realm.

I was attempting to give members some food for thought without going into areas that are over the line. It's a grey area, and one we need to be cautious about discussing in this type of venue.

Staying within the boundaries of your security classfication is your responsibility, just as it is my responsibility or anybody elses who has one to do the same. Its not unreasonable for those of us who are interested to ask questions but if you can't answer then don't, nobody has a gun to your head.

Originally Posted by highsea

Does your computer process every packet on the Internet?

let me put it this way- it's under no obligation to consume CPU cycles on the radar processor or CIP with unwanted signals.

If it hits the airplanes antennas in most any reasonable bandwitdth then yes the Common integrated processor as I understand it does burn a couple of cycles looking at it, If only in that the RWR is seeing a hit and the CIP is going to want to have the ability to put that info onto a MFD. If it is within roughly the wavelegnths as nearly anything the airplane transmits or receives regularly be it an IFF query, or hell even ILS bands something is going to burn a cycle or two of CIP power. Now I am relatively unsure of what the receiver filters that are built into the system are and how much system resources they take, but they are there, and they take some resources (most likely a very negligable ammount for most common transmissions) as hardware filtering makes it really really hard to have a quickly enough adaptable system to deal with outside tech developments.

Maxor- it depends entirely on how the module is tasked by the radar program. It's not a passive component of the system.

I'm talking about what can be programmed, not what a specific set does. Some systems retrofit AESA antennas to existing back ends, others like APG-77 and APG-80 go into the CIP. They operate under different principles from the programming standpoint.

Capabilities vary.

The module itself has onboard processing- there is no law of nature that says it can't reject signals at the MMIC level. It's all controlled by the radar program. IOW, you can task a module to forward a specific signal only, and reject everything else. Only the return you are specifically looking for needs to be sent to the CIP for processing and display.

Similarly, a module can be tasked not to transmit or receive at all. It depends on what you are trying to do. For example. if you are using it as an RWR or to generate a target track passively, there is no need to transmit anything. If you are tasking it for jamming, you can program it to forward signals within a set range to the CIP for processing, and re-transmit the jamming signal only.

It's all about the software and how you task the modules.

Highseas - without compromising any security concerns, could you let us know what sort of MIPS rating the CIPS have?

My understanding is that they are drastically less than those of commercial processors but im not sure if this is genuinely the case...

^^^ You can't really compare the two, since CIP's are embedded systems. They don't run generic operating systems. They use COTS processors, but they run parallel boards and the array has embedded processors on each MMIC.

The F-22's CIP is said to have the processing capability of 2 Cray supercomputers.

Thanks for that highsea - just looked at the F22 page on global security that echoes those figures. ( although only 300 meg of memory but i suppose i need to disconnect my windows mentality here!)

I suppose raw MIPS comparisons are meaningless as it depends on the complexity of the instructions being carried out.. I still think that (contrary to pop belief) military computing lies nearly a generation behind cutting edge IT

Originally Posted by PubFather

...I still think that (contrary to pop belief) military computing lies nearly a generation behind cutting edge IT

It does, but for good reason. Military needs reliability over raw CPU cycles. And embedded software doesn't take advantage of the latest and greatest in CPU's anyway. The only thing that matters is that it works in a stable manner and does the job it's supposed to do. The programs are all written specific to the processor and hard coded in NVRAM. All updates are burned to the RAM with a new tape.

Commercial is the same, only more so. The FBW system in the B777 has 3 different processors from 3 different manufacturers- one Intel, one AMD, and one Motorola. None of them were cutting edge when it was first designed, and they did it that way for safety reasons. Each one arrives at the answer through different processes, and they compare the end result. This helps to identify errors generated by the hardware.

Originally Posted by highsea

It does, but for good reason. Military needs reliability over raw CPU cycles.

Commercial is the same, only more so. The FBW system in the B777 has 3 different processors from 3 different manufacturers- one Intel, one AMD, and one Motorola. None of them were cutting edge when it was first designed, and they did it that way for safety reasons. Each one arrives at the answer through different processes, and they compare the end result. This helps to identify errors generated by the hardware.

Excellent reply! RAM, gigabytes, bus speed, all of that takes a distant back seat to functionality. If a certain bus speed is needed to perform a difficult task such as sorting electronic signals, then it'll have it, but the vast majority of airborne hardware simply needs to work, with redundancy. We all remember the Apollo - a kid's cell phone these days has more computing power, but Apollo still made it to the moon and back.

Thanks for that highsea - it certainly does make sense to seek functionality and reliability over pure speed - imagine a Vista based F22 ...