Raytheon, an RTX (NYSE: RTX) business, has received a Phase 1 contract from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop an all-optical signal-processing system under the PICASSO research program. The work targets a consequential defense-computing constraint: military systems that use light to carry signals can lose the speed, bandwidth and efficiency advantages of photonics when they must repeatedly convert those signals into electrical form for processing.
Raytheon said its Advanced Technology team will design and demonstrate photonic circuit technology that processes signals with light rather than electricity. The company said such a system could help operators detect threats sooner, respond more quickly and preserve situational awareness in contested environments. The Phase 1 award is a research and development step, not a fielded capability or a procurement of an operational system.
Photonic integrated circuits use light to move and manipulate information. They can offer advantages in speed, energy use and bandwidth, but scaling them is difficult. DARPA says optical signals can degrade and accumulate noise as they travel through long processing chains, while scattering and back-reflections can undermine signal fidelity in larger systems.
Existing photonic circuits commonly convert optical signals back into electrical signals to refine and process the data. That approach can manage those physical limits, but DARPA says it also gives up advantages inherent to photonics. PICASSO — short for Photonic Integrated Circuit Architectures for Scalable System Objectives — is intended to move the field beyond individual components and toward circuit- and system-level designs that can support much larger photonic integration.
Raytheon’s proposed approach would remove the conversion step. According to the company, keeping critical processing in the optical domain could maintain signal strength and integrity while circuits become smaller and more complex. It plans to draw on photonics-process development, radio-frequency design and its experience with military systems; a commercial industry partner will provide design and simulation tools for the effort.
For defense and government technology leaders, the news is relevant because sensing and communications systems often need to process large volumes of data under time pressure. One potential future application would be a military or homeland-security command post using photonic processing within a sensor chain to help operators sort incoming signals with less delay. That is an illustrative use case, not a deployment identified by Raytheon or DARPA.
The work could also matter for the wider supply chain behind advanced sensors, radio-frequency systems and secure communications. DARPA’s program description frames the challenge as one of scaling photonic circuits without allowing signal degradation to erase their architectural advantages. If the research produces stable all-optical circuit designs, system builders could have a new option for specialized workloads where processing latency and signal quality are operational constraints.
Important questions remain. RTX did not disclose the contract value, development schedule, test criteria or specific platforms that would use the technology. All-optical processing is also being pursued in a research program, so agencies should distinguish the Phase 1 design-and-demonstration goal from proven field performance. Still, the contract places Raytheon in a DARPA effort aimed at a practical bottleneck in next-generation sensing: retaining photonics’ speed at the point where complex processing is required.