Essex Awarded $25M Contract for DoD Radar Programs

COLUMBIA, MD., May 10 -- Essex Corp., a developer of optoelectronic processors and technologies for signal processing applications, announced today it has been awarded a five-year IDIQ (indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity) contract with a potential value of $25 million from the US Department of Defense (DoD), Naval Air Warfare Center, to use its signal-processing technologies to enhance DoD radar programs.

This contract was competitively procured and continues research started under the Small Business Innovative Research (SBIR) Program. Essex also received a fully funded $2.4 million task under the contract to design a next-generation advanced optical processor (AOP) demonstration unit during the next 12 months for the US Missile Defense Agency.

The AOP is an ultrawide-bandwidth optoelectronic processor that enables increased radar resolution and threat assessment. Essex said the goal of this task is to develop a 1 to 2-GHz AOP with an open architecture applicable to many types of radar systems.