During August, Northrop Grumman carried out and completed a series of flight tests on its new Electronically-Scanned Multifunction Reconfigurable Integrated Sensor (EMRIS).

EMRIS is a sensor capable of operating simultaneously as a radar, ultra-wideband communications centre and electronic warfare system, rapidly reconfigurable and with easily upgradable software (even in flight). It is small enough to be integrated on a wide range of current and next-generation aircraft (on the nose or inside the wings), including small UAS, or on (presumably ‘high-end’) munitions, although it is primarily designed to equip Collaborative Combat Aircraft and, potentially, future NGAD fighters.

According to the company's official communication, the flight test campaign was carried out with an unspecified ‘government-provided aircraft’ and focused on demonstrating the validity of the ‘open architecture of the EMRIS, through integration and use of third-party applications, as well as the software's in-flight update capabilities’. In addition, Northrop Grumman states that a test phase is underway on a second sensor in order to ‘demonstrate scalability’, a phase that includes the creation of 2 miniaturised EMRIS ‘for application demonstrations on smaller platforms’. It was not specified whether a ‘standard’ flight test campaign is planned, or whether these tests are related to a configuration for a specific platform, or requested by a specific customer. As far as specific components are concerned, details are extremely scarce to date.

The only established fact is that the sensor is based on an electronically scanning radar - developed in collaboration with DARPA as part of the ‘Arrays on Commercial Timescales’ programme - which, as mentioned, has an architecture that allows it to operate simultaneously on different radio frequency modes.

According to Northrop Grumman, EMRIS has been designed using ‘common digital building blocks and pushed containerisation of software’ to enable ‘rapid and cost-effective production’. For the development of the new sensor, the company would have drained key technologies from other programmes, although it is not specified which (programmes and technologies).

Nonetheless, as speculation, it is possible to envisage a genuine link between the current sensor and systems recently developed by the company for the E-7 WEDGETAIL and the F-16 (MESA and SABR radar), the F-16 VIPER (EW suite) and the E-11 BACN (communications suite).

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