The Industrial Challenges of Airborne AESA Radars
Stephane Kemkemian*, Alain Larroque †, Cyrille Enderli+
*Thales Airborne Systems, France, stephane.kemkemian@fr.thalesgroup.com
†
Thales Airborne Systems, France, alain.larroque@fr.thalesgroup.com
+
Thales Airborne Systems, France, cyrille-jean.enderli@fr.thalesgroup.com
Keywords: AESA, Airborne Radar, Test, Built-In-Test,
Production, Data Mining, Bayesian Network.
Abstract
AESA technology has been an important development for
the Radar industry. The AESA has dramatically increased
the operational capability of modern Radars compared to
the mechanically scanned Radars.
The first generations of AESA Radar used to have higher
costs of production. At this time, that has been accepted
for two reasons: better performance and the higher
reliability of these AESA systems finally make lower their
total cost of ownership during their lifespan.
But now the aim is to reduce as much as possible the cost
of production of AESA Radars.
The purpose of this paper is to take stock of achievements
in the production of active antenna Radar. The industrial
issues associated with the development of AESA Radars
within THALES Airborne Systems and the
industrialization solutions under development are
presented.
1 Introduction
Compared to “classical” systems where the transmit signal
is generated by a separate source and applied to the
antenna, the AESA provides the transmit power and
receive capability at the level of each individual module.
This distributed arrangement significantly reduces RF
losses compared to systems with central transmitter and
receiver. At given overall power consumption, a figure of
merit of the RF part (so performance in terms of detection
range and tracking) is found to be much better than
achieved by centralized systems.
Thank to the instant beam steering agility, multiple-modes
can operate at the same time, something not possible with
conventional mechanically scanned systems. An
impossible thing to do with M-SCAN Radar is to have,
viewed from the operator, several Radars in one. With
AESA and now available processing capabilities, this old
dream is now possible with a single Radar and so a single
platform.
Another advantage of such a distributed transmit and
receive scheme is the ability to reconfigure the antenna's
sub-arrays according to the modes. This capability will be
leveraged with the upcoming generation of AESA Radars
with multiple sub-arrays.
Because there are no moving parts to wear out, and the
antenna remains operational even if some modules have
failed (graceful degradation), the antenna lifespan can run
into thousands of hours. Moreover, the far better reliability
of these AESA systems significantly reduces the cost of
ownership.
2 The AESA
From an industrial point of view, the AESA is divided into
subsets of different technologies:
x The Transmit / Receive Modules (TRM),
x The microwave distribution,
x Complex motherboards,
x Power electronics modules (power supplies),
x Analog and microwave subsets,
x The mechanical structure,
x The conditioning system.
From a supply chain perspective, the AESA differs from
the other parts of the Radar by production logic of large
and medium series for specific items in the active antenna:
x The MMIC (Monolithic Microwave Integrated
Circuits) in GaAs technology performing the
functions of amplification, gain and phase control
for each channel. Production rates are several
thousand units per month
x The TRM whose production rate is several hundred
units per month. A TRM includes:
o Microwave components (including
encapsulated MMIC),
o Digital components (e.g. FPGAs),
o Mechanics and hydraulics devices.
x The other sub-assemblies are produced in unitary
quantity or multi-unit quantities. The technologies
involved in are more widely mastered. These small
series are outsourced to standard suppliers.
The supply chain for the production of the AESA was
progressively implemented from the realization and the
integration of the first prototypes. It has ensured the rise in
Manufacturing Readiness Level (MRL) of new
technologies used in manufacturing. This supply chain is
now fully qualified.
3 The industrial future of AESA
For the production of future versions of AESA, new
challenges are to be addressed. Indeed, the development of
new Radar capabilities will be coupled with the
progressive introduction of new technologies. Several are
already highly advanced: air cooling, replacement in the
MMIC of GaAs by the couple GaN-SiGe...
These changes must be anticipated in building the supply
chain to minimize the non-recurring costs (NRC) both with
the external suppliers and at the level of internal testing
resources.
Moreover, the generalization of AESA will be
accompanied by a stronger demand from customer to
reduce the recurring cost (RC) of the AESA Radars at a
similar level than that of “old mechanically scanned
Radars”.
In order to make possible the holding of this objective, the
industrial management was integrated right from the start
of projects. Two working axes were identified:
x The injection of industrial constraints in developing
the sensor and its subsets
x A New test and integration strategy was promoted.
This second point has led to aim a “lean” Control and
Testing Plan (CTP). This CTP will be detail later in the
paper.
4 The “Control and Testing Plan”
This CTP was being carried out on all Radars
manufactured by THALES Airborne Systems for over
forty years. It has mainly three test steps:
x Functional tests at subsets level including printed
boards and electronic assemblies.
x Performance verifications at subset level and
elimination of youth’s defects on subsets (e.g.
receiver, transmitter, etc.).
x Verification of Sensor system performances.
The targeted evolution consists in physically integrating
the entire Radar in one step. More specifically, on an
AESA Radar, the tests are focused on the TRM and the
whole Radar. The main benefits which are expected are:
x Reduction of NRC related to the industrial means
(number of tests to be defined, required test
software, training of people involved in tests, etc.).
x Reduction of RC:
o Suppression of mechanical assemblies
required for intermediate tests.
o Reduction of required tests number.
o The reduction in maintenance cost of the
test means.
o Shortening of production cycle.
This industrial scheme allows THALES Airborne Systems
to be in a “lean” and robust logic with respect to some
possible re-works (very short repairing loop).
5 The evolution of the test strategy
The evolution of the industrialization strategy and
integration tests of the AESA goes along with functional
evolutions of the Radar and relies on the following
principles:
x A calibration of the AESA subset via the Radar.
x A test mode to characterize the sensor.
x Functional tests based on the Built-In-Test (BIT) of
the Radar.
x The use of data mining to detect youth’s defects in
particular of the AESA.
This strategy allows for integration testing regardless of
the Radar sensor’s standard.
5.1 The calibration means
Classically, the means used are the Near Field Chamber
(NFC) to calibrate all the antenna’s channels, both on
transmit and receive, and the Compact Far Field Chamber
(CFFC) to characterize the antenna beam after calibration.
The new industrialization’s methods have allowed
deducting by simulation the characteristics of the AESA
(radiation pattern, gain, aperture, directivity, etc.) directly
from measurements made in NFC (without the need of
CFFC tests) [1], [2] and [3].
For the production of new AESA, the industrial objective
is to pursue simplifying the means of calibration and
characterization of antennas. The roadmap for the means
of calibration (cf. Figure 1. ) consists of two phases:
x The development of an external calibration caisson
to calibrate the AESA installed on the Radar.
x Development of a self-calibration method
embedded in the Radar.

Figure 1. Characterization and calibration AESA roadmap.
5.2 The Test Mode
The test mode is an embedded software application in
which the Radar makes use of its spectral and temporal
analysis capabilities as well as some capabilities of
stimulation provided from the design of Radar (synthetic
echo generator, re-injection of the transmitted signal). It
thus performs a self-characterization of the Radar sensor
without external means. The test mode allows:
x In industrialization phase: reduction of NRC
related to testing hardware and the software
developments for tests,
x In production phase: lower costs of ownership of
the test means and reduction of test time.
x In operational use: improvement of operational
availability and reduction of maintenance
resources.
The main measurements concern the TRM (voltages,
currents, temperatures); the characteristics of the signals
issued from the exciter (power, insulation, noise level, and
timing); the characterization of transceiver channels (in
temporal and spectral domains, on-carrier spectral purity).
The measured values are available for internal use by the
Radar modes but also by the Radar test-bed. (Test reports,
Statistical Process Control).
5.3 The functional tests
Functional tests have been developed in production for
detecting youth’s defects of Radars and lower removal rate
as original equipment.
The principle is to operate the Radar in operational
configurations by stimulating its inputs according to
deterministic scenarios of a few hours.
The total operating time without failure (ambient, cold, hot
temperature) is a few tens of hours. During testing, the
behavior of the Radar is monitored via the Built-In-Test
(B.I.T.).
The measured results have shown the effectiveness of such
tests not only in the first installations (defects divided by
three) but also at the beginning of exploitation.
5.4 The Data Mining
1) Limitation due to the current B.I.T.
The test method, which has been previously described,
suffers from limitations that are inherent to the nature of
the B.I.T. itself.
Indeed, the B.I.T. is optimized for the operational use and
not for testing in production phase. Thus, to avoid
detecting too many intermittent faults, which would be
unmanageable in operational support, several “software
filters” are used for masking too many transient faults.
To overcome this problem, one solution is to use directly
the raw data used by the B.I.T. from the different subsets
right after their aggregation.
These raw data have clearly much richer content; nut no
one (“human” agent) can neither effectively exploit such
content nor find the inference relations existing within the
data. Indeed, the flow of raw data to B.I.T. is of the order
of 140 words (16-bits) each millisecond.
2) Data Mining Experimentation
To validate this principle, works have been performed
using a COTS Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) software called
BAYESIALAB• (version 4.6.5) developed by the
BAYESIA Company [4], 0. The process has mainly two
steps:
a) 1st step – Supervised learning:
By running a Radar unit considered “good” during hours
in various conditions, the software creates a Bayesian
Network (BN). The nodes of the BN are “significant”
variables extracted from the data flow issued from the
B.I.T.
To give an order of idea, the learning data base which was
used has a size of three millions lines of 140 words (about
one hour of recording) and it takes about 15 minutes to
build the network on a standard desktop. The data
processing (analysis of the base, learning, creation of
network and inferences computation) has provided a
consistent pattern of the vision of a “Radar expert”. For
comparison, it takes about four days for ten “human”
Radar experts to get the same result by modeling a system
of thirty variables with three states.
The learning is supervised in the sense that a “human”
oracle can tell what is true and what is false and add a
priori knowledge in the learning phase. The learning is
performed on the binary words of the B.I.T. without any
knowledge of the meaning of each bit from the software.
Various tests have been performed in order to reduce the
number of processed information and optimize the
parameters of BAYESIALAB• (coefficient of structural
complexity1, aggregation of values of the same node, etc.).
This 1st Bayesian network constitutes the “learning model
of reference”. A simplified example of generated network
is provided at Figure 2. :
 The data mining tools are to be optimized in order to
facilitate the development, automate actions and their
chaining (data comparison and warning criteria on results).

REFERENCE
Figure 2. Bayesian network modeling the Radar.

b) 2nd step – Detection and localization of failures:

By running now the Radar to be tested, new learning
models are created as new Bayesian networks modeling
the behavior of the Radar to be tested. The analysis of the
statistical deviations between the reference model and the
models obtained from the Radar under test allows
determining when and where failures occur.
The experimental study was conducted by generating
twenty test cases. Two of them included simulated fugitive
Figure 3. Likelihood Graph of Reference.
failures and a third one was recorded while the antenna
was perturbed by an incoming spurious signal during
calibration. The data files were analyzed blindly by
BAYESIALAB•.
To penalize the samples under test, we have demonstrated CASE #3
the interest of penalty based on the following criteria:
x The functions of density / distribution of the Log-
Likelihood:  log 2  joint probability and,

x Consistency with the contingency table2.

By testing a “good” Radar (not the same one used for the
learning phase), the concordance value with the
contingency table was found greater than 92%.
In the other three cases (where disturbances have been
artificially introduced), BAYESIALAB• detected three
cases of deviation from the reference:
x The two cases of deviation expected “fugitive
failure” showed concordances with the Figure 4. Likelihood Graph of case #3.
contingency table of respectively 82% and 86%.
x The third case of deviation “perturbation by
spurious signal” had a very low concordance In order to facilitate the implementation of data mining, it
(< 50%) and a graph of likelihood very different has been identified that the quantity of information
from the reference (cf. Figure 4. ). accessible inside the Radar shall be maximized by favoring
the use of raw values (e.g. power value of a signal rather
It is thus seen that an appropriate threshold on the than a state with respect to a threshold).
concordance value with the contingency table can be used
to declare a Radar unit “good” or “bad”. This constraint should be reflected in the specification of
hardware and Radar software as well as Radar architecture
These tests led to the following conclusions: (information to be provided on the same internal bus).
x The monitoring of a few tens of data words has The short term objective is to perform this processing in
been enough to detect faults injected into the test delayed time within the test-bed. Therefore, this will
cases. To deal with real cases, the analysis of require:
additional parameters will be required.
 x The development by automatic learning of a
Bayesian network of reference;
x The calculation of the joint probabilities of all BIT
data issued from the Radars tested;
x Identification of diagnostic criteria;
x Doubtful lines identification in the data file and
targeting of suspicious variables enabling the
localization of defects.
In the longer term, it will be possible to integrate this data
mining directly into the Radar. This would pave the way
for a concept of preventive and smart maintenance
onboard.
6 Conclusion
The production of AESA helped to define a mature supply
chain, in manufacturing stage as well as in test stage.
Taking into consideration well in advance during the
design and development phases of industrial factors has
allowed a significant increase in MRL of new technologies
as well as in the control of industrialization NRC.
The next step involves the simplification of the industrial
production tool of AESA for lowering the costs of
production significantly.
Acknowledgements
The authors wish to thank the BAYESIA Company for its
collaboration in the work on data mining.
References
[1] Renard, Silvy, “Testing an airborne phased array military Satcom
antenna with ARAMIS near-field range”, 12th AMTA (Antenna
Measurement Techniques Association) Symposium, Philadelphia,
PA, USA, Oct.8-10, 1990.
[2] Patent 08-02985 (FR), 30 Mai 2008, “Procédé et dispositif de
mesure en champ proche du facteur de mérite d’une antenne”.
[3] Chabod, Renard, “SOSTAR-X Active Antenna: Results and
Lessons Learned” , EuMW / EuRAD 2008 Conference, Amsterdam,
Netherlands, Oct.27-31, 2008.
[4] http://www.bayesia.com/en/products/bayesialab/resources/case-
studies/modeling-simulation-dynamic-systems.php
[5] Weber P., Jouffe L., “Reliability modelling with Dynamic Bayesian
Networks”, SafeProcess 2003, 5th IFAC Symposium on Fault
Detection, Supervision and Safety of Technical Processes,
Washington D.C.

1
This parameter allows increasing the threshold of significance of
probabilistic relationships modeled in the network.
2
The consistency measures the quality of the representation of data
through the network (structures and parameters).