The Pentagon’s research arm has created what it calls the world’s most advanced electronic warfare test system, capable of realistic and large-scale emulation of electronic warfare (EW) scenarios.
The system, called Digital Radio Frequency Battlespace Emulator (DRBE), is scheduled to move to a U.S. Navy laboratory in late 2025, where it will be incorporated into the Department of Defense’s (DOD) testing and evaluation framework.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been developing DRBE since 2019 to enhance the Defense Department’s ability to test new electronic warfare capabilities and simulate realistic effects such as radar jamming and spoofing.
In a news release, DARPA said that at the heart of the DRBE is a real-time, high-performance wafer-scale computing architecture, or “Real-Time HPC,” powered by the world’s largest processor.
“This compute system delivers massive throughput with ultra-low latency, a critical requirement for simulating complex radio frequency (RF) engagements with the timing precision needed for modern EW tactics,” DARPA said.
Anna Tauke-Pedretti, Ph.D., program manager in DARPA’s Microsystems Technology Office, called DRBE “a leap forward in how we can prepare and equip RF systems against sophisticated adversaries.”
She told Defense News that DRBE allows DOD testers to tailor test events to specific scenarios, controlling variables to better understand system responses in different environments.
“We’re able to test systems under more controlled and varying scenarios,” she said. “We can choose what we test against and what our environment looks like so we can better understand how our systems respond in certain environments.”
Jenifer Koch, chief technologist for Aircraft and Spectrum Integration Environments at the Navy, said DRBE is redefining the scale at which the Navy can develop EW payloads. “It empowers our lab to craft solutions with unprecedented sophistication, significantly boosting confidence in their effectiveness,” she added.
