Thirty years of machines that had to be right
The full record behind the byline — program by program, from a blank page to fielded hardware.
Stood up the organization from scratch and built and fielded Raytheon Missile Systems’ common-product portfolio — Ultra (the composable common guidance electronics / digital receiver-exciter), isoBlock miniaturized integrated power conversion, the Kraken Control Actuation System, the secure-processor portfolio, and MissileKit (a common software and simulation environment) — and established the business processes to deploy them across the unit.
Led a development effort pursuing on the order of $1B in new business across nearly every discipline at RMS. Invented the Ultra electronics design concept and led its hardware and software through build, test, and demonstration. Ultra is the composable common-electronics architecture publicly reported to be fielded across more than ten weapons programs. Sat on the strategic council setting internal-research investment across competing programs.
eXpandible Form-factored Advanced Common TOpology Receiver. Assembled a multidisciplinary team and ran tens of millions in internal-research funding over five years to architect, build, and demonstrate a common, modular, multi-mode RF guidance package. X-Factor pioneered mixed-signal circuit-card assemblies and the first truly modular, function-defined card stack.
2013: ground-tested at Point Loma — detected and tracked surface ships over five days with zero hardware failures. 2014: captive-flight-tested with the Tomahawk passive array at China Lake — detected and tracked ground emitters.
Led the multidisciplinary effort to develop an upgraded guidance section, owning the system requirements flowdown and the system and receiver design.
Used Vertical Requirements Development to flow down the design of the Datalink Electronics stack.
Redesigned the receiver firmware, led integration and test and flight-test data analysis, and drove the production transition — the program finished production deliveries a year ahead of schedule.
Developed an algorithm to measure geometric altitude in GPS-denied environments using the aircraft’s own air-data — building a temperature/pressure profile of the atmosphere, periodically re-calibrated against radar updates, and back-solving geometric height through hydrostatic equilibrium, accurate to roughly 100 feet. Also helped integrate GPS into the F-15E navigation suite. (The concept originated with his mentor, Carl D. Pruess; Frericks made it work.)
Developed discrimination algorithms for the Infrared Search & Track (IRST) system, and built the inter-processor communication architecture, FPGA code, and DSP code for a Space-Time Adaptive Processing algorithm for the E-2C radar.
Invention disclosures & IP: X-Factor Electronics; a Real-Time Multi-Rate FFT Engine for EW Receiver Applications.
Internal technical talks: X-Factor for Electronic Attack & Cyber (2014); Grand Slam Architecture red-team review (2014); Next-Generation DREX Architectures (2012); Common GEU DREX: X-Factor (2010).
Frericks was appointed Principal Engineering Fellow in 2019 on the nomination of his supervisor, Laura J. McGill — then Raytheon’s Vice President of Engineering, now Director of Sandia National Laboratories — and approved by Mark E. Russell, then Raytheon’s Vice President of Engineering, Technology & Mission Assurance. His earlier nomination to Engineering Fellow was endorsed by Laura McGill, Dave Ashing, and Marty Rupp, and formally evaluated in the top tier across two review cycles (2012 and 2015). The career history above is corroborated on his public LinkedIn profile.