OREANDA-NEWS. May 13, 2015. The U.S. Navy and Raytheon Company (NYSE: RTN) have completed the AN/SPY-6(V) Air and Missile Defense Radar (AMDR) critical design review. The outcome confirms Raytheon's design and technologies as mature, producible and low risk; on track to meet all radar performance requirements, on schedule and within cost. 

The CDR assessed all technical aspects of the program, from hardware specifications, software development, risk mitigation and producibility analysis, to program management, test and evaluation schedules, and cost assessments. The review concluded with Navy stakeholders impressed with the radar's progress to date and confident in the program's path forward to on-time delivery.

"This successful milestone is the culmination of our team's unwavering focus on continuous technology maturity, risk mitigation and cost reduction throughout all phases of development," said Raytheon's Kevin Peppe, vice president of Integrated Defense Systems' Seapower Capability Systems business area. "With customer validation in hand, we will now advance production, driving toward the ultimate – and timely – delivery of this highly capable and much-needed integrated air and missile defense radar capability to the DDG 51 Flight III destroyer."

The Engineering and Manufacturing Development (EMD) phase of the program continues and is now more than 40 percent complete. Raytheon attributes its exemplary performance to the implementation of an Agile development and management methodology for AMDR. This approach supports the ongoing hardware and software design verification, technology maturity, producibility, and risk-reduction imperatives – yielding benefits across all program elements in productivity, quality and affordability.

All aspects of the AMDR EMD phase are progressing according to plan, from software development to pilot array testing. The first Engineering Development Model production-representative Radar Modular Assembly (RMA) is currently undergoing testing in the risk-reduction pilot array at the company's Near Field Range in Sudbury, Mass.

The team has also delivered the first external combat system interface definition language increment to the Combat System Integration Working Group – the Government-industry team comprised of Raytheon, Navy and Lockheed Martin experts that is focused on AMDR integration with the DDG 51 Flight III's AEGIS combat system.

About SPY-6(V) AMDR
SPY-6(V) is the 21st-century integrated air and ballistic missile defense radar for the U.S. Navy, filling a critical capability gap for the surface fleet. It is the first truly scalable radar, built with radar building blocks (Radar Modular Assemblies) that can be grouped to form any size radar aperture, either smaller or larger than currently fielded radars. All cooling, power, command logic and software are scalable. This scalability could allow for new instantiations, such as back-fit on existing DDG 51 destroyers and installation on aircraft carriers, amphibious warfare ships, frigates, or the Littoral Combat Ship and DDG 1000 classes, without significant radar development costs.

Leveraging Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology to optimize power in a smaller size and using less space, power and cooling than older technology would require for the same performance, AMDR is a key enabler for the capability and performance enhancements of the new DDG 51 Flight III ship. SPY-6(V) for DDG 51 Flight III is designed with high operational availability and reliability to minimize overall ownership cost.