Future Technological Challenges for High Performance Radars

New developing trends of future Radars with their technological challenges are addressed in this paper. Starting with Multifunctional RF Systems, multiple RF functions such as Radar, Electronic Support Measures (ESM), Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) and Data Links are supposed to operate on a common hardware platform with shared Active Electronically Scanned Array (AESA) antenna systems in the future, requiring huge bandwidths for such AESAs, not operationally available at present. For some time there is the continuous progression towards knowledge-aided radar systems to automatically adapt to the environment and the mission context via cognitive approaches in waveform generation, in the target detection and classification process along with the advances in optimized and efficient resource management schemes to manage these new sensor flexibilities. Another progressive trend to be discussed is the advantage in aggregating detection results from distributed radar apertures to exploit diverse information from multi-static set-ups with the emerging Passive Radar technology as a special sub-set of this class. Finally an outlook towards Multiple-In, Multiple-Out (MIMO) Radars as a special form of the evolving trend of digital frontends is presented.