Cambridge Consultants Blog
Extending the life of technologies for decades
By Alan Richardson - Last updated: Thursday, October 6, 2011Businesses need to not only make technology breakthroughs, they need to continuously improve technologies and adapt them to market opportunities. An example that has been an important technology capability within Cambridge Consultants for thirty years is broad band radar, which has enabled a succession of innovative product developments.
At Cambridge Consultants, one strand of our business has been in a niche area of radar since the 1980s and we have created a succession of measurement and detection tools optimised for shorter range applications, typically up to about 30 metres range.
In the 1980s, we developed the Advanced Radar Missile Scorer, the first qualified non cooperative missile scoring 
system that has been used in missile evaluation and pilot training in UK, US, France, Italy and Australia and is still in production today. We also developed the Exstar radar, which was able to measure the thickness of arctic sea ice floes from a helicopter at a time when the altenrative was labroiously drilling cores through the ice to see how thick it was. With that new technology, oil companies could measure more ice in a day than they could in a season by the manual drilling method and that was an important enabling technology to offshore oil exploitation in arctic regions. Climate change and the retreat of sea ice has made this less important(!) In the 1990s, the same technology was adapted to process industry applications (a very resilient and accurate liquid level sensor) and to short range sensing applications around cars.
After 2001, with the new threats from terrorists, there was increasing need for tools to aid the security forces in hostage situations. We developed Prism 200 which has been sold around the world and offers intuitive imaging through the walls of a building where hostages are being held. In 2011, this won the Queen’s Award for Enterprise in the Innovation category.
Most recently by adding the kind of massively parallel real-time processing now available, we have been able to create a “software radar” analogous to “software radio” where beamforming is done in the digital domain. This extends the range of this technology to hundreds of meters to ten kilometres depending on the application. It exploits our complementary capabilities in radar and digital signal processing for software radio that have underpinned some of our innovative wireless product development in low power integrated circuits and small base station development. The advantage of this kind of sensor is its abiltiy to operate in an environment with dynamic clutter in a way that is impossible for normal scanning radars. One lead application is the training crews against the terrorist threat from fast attack boats by the US Navy.
Buts its the next application that is the most exciting yet.
