2007 Issue 3 - Raytheon

corporate technology goals for 2007. “We
need to push innovation, which will provide
superior customer solutions,” said Shyu.
“We also need to come up with designs
that are truly producible. For growth, we
need to align our tech road maps to emerging
opportunities, looking at where our
opportunities are growing in the next five
to 10 years. We need to leverage our innovation
and disruptive technologies to enter
new adjacent markets and we need to
expand our intellectual property or IP portfolio.
Our goal, through Technology and
Research, is to provide Raytheon’s enterprise-wide
technology vision and direction
and nurture our disruptive technology
efforts, to make sure that our company’s on
the leading edge of innovation, helping our
customer to achieve mission success.”
Another memorable presentation focusing
on the need for sustained innovation was
delivered by Mike Vahey, principal engineering
fellow. “Our corporation has some of
the best engineers in the world,” said
Vahey. “We’re extremely innovative and we
have really creative ideas, but we don’t
always carry them across the goal line.
Innovation is a critical part to growing the
future. Innovation is not guaranteed success,
so you have to weigh in the failures.
But the opposite of pursuing innovation is
never achieving. We have to strive to
ensure that our products and processes can
bring the future to the present — accelerating
the discovery and adoption of technology
that meets customer capability needs
and Mission Assurance.”
RF Systems Symposium
The ninth annual All-Raytheon RF Systems
Symposium was held June 18–21 in
Tucson, Ariz. Hosted by Raytheon Missile
Systems (MS), the event was called
“Sustaining and Disruptive RF Systems
Leading the Way for Today and Tomorrow.”
The symposium featured one day of
keynote speakers and three days of presentations,
workshops and exhibits chock full
of pertinent information for RF engineers
and technologists.
Don Targoff, vice president of Technology at
MS, kicked off the activities with his
keynote speech. Targoff discussed the current
products, disruptive technologies,
future trends and innovative activities such
as “Bike Shop.” Named in honor of the
Wright Brothers, Bike Shop is a more radical,
high-speed prototyping facility in
Tucson that’s internally funded. The workload
has increased significantly in recent
years: from a few million dollars three years
ago to roughly $90 million in 2007.
Richard Taylor, a senior fellow and the project’s
chief engineer, gave a presentation on
a project called “Sheriff,” a non-lethal,
Events
directed energy weapon and short-range
active denial system that safely repels people.
Taylor discussed the rapid prototyping
involved with Sheriff, which was developed
and deployed to warfighters in just six
months. Sheriff will be used for crowd control
purposes in Iraq.
“The idea was to have an active denial system
to discriminate between who’s coming
toward you to do harm and who’s actually
just there to protest,” said Taylor. “This is
a millimeter wave-beam that heats up or
penetrates down through the layers of
skin, warms up the moisture in the skin
and creates a burning sensation that repels
the aggressor.”
From the 15-year returnee to the six-month
junior engineer, the message was the same
— the symposium was educational, interesting
and above all, useful. It was an
opportunity to display work in front of new
eyes, and obtain fresh perspectives which
might lead to further breakthroughs.
www://home.ray.com/technetworks
RAYTHEON TECHNOLOGY TODAY 2007 ISSUE 3 27