Defense Speak Interpreted: Will Defense Become a Totally New Supplier for Drone Electronics?
The Right Approach: The End of an Era—DoD Proposes MIL-PRF-31032 Cancellation
At one end of Raytheon’s sprawling campus in Andover, Massachusetts, in a foundry that makes a military-grade version of a powerful semiconductor, a tiny computer chip comes into being.
Just down the road, in a testing chamber with high ceilings and blue acoustic foam lining the walls, another chip just like it – nested inside a circuit card, then a larger assembly and ultimately a fully built naval radar – has a surge of power sent through it. A robot tests, torques and calibrates every part to make sure it’s ready to hit the high seas.
From there, it’s ready to ship out.
That end-to-end activity is the hallmark of what Raytheon calls its “vertically integrated” Radar Development Facility – and the very reason that the business, now several years into the design and manufacture of the U.S. Navy’s SPY-6 radar, is confident it can continue to produce that system on time, at scale and at reasonable cost.
“From chip to ship, every stage of production happens in parallel,” said Jason Rathbone, executive director of Naval Radars at Raytheon, an RTX business.
