Raytheon Marine was established in 1990 with the acquisition of Autohelm Ltd, the world's largest manufacturer of autopilots.The first product was produced under the Autohelm trademark and its early success led to further development with additional product types being quickly added. The company subsequently changed its name to Autohelm Ltd.
With the acquisition by Raytheon in 1990 the company became Raytheon Marine's UK division with "Autohelm" being retained as a product name. Raytheon already had considerable marine interests in the U.S. with a range of products being sold under the names of both Raytheon and Apelco. Today the company's defence-related technology is being applied to new marine navigation equipment for the commercial market.
(This section was paraphrased from the Raytheon Marine website)
We were involved with Raytheon Marine from January 1997 until February 1997, working on the design of a marine radar.
This company was responsible for solving a variety of technical problems associated with the hardware of a range of radar equipment. The radars contained an ARM RISC microprocessor, a signal processing ASIC, a CRT video module, a switched mode power supply and interfaces to the ship subsystems. The design was at an advanced stage when Sharpedge Consultants was brought in, with an approaching launch date requiring immediate action. The outstanding issues included problems with the signal processing, video, EMC, power supply and analogue interfaces. Extensive liaison was required between the hardware and software teams to solve various interfacing and driver problems. At the end of the contract the product was basically working.
Preliminary work was started for an accessory product, which would allow chart information to be superimposed on the radar images. This would also have been based on the ARM core, although development work was halted when it became evident that costs would be too high for the intended pleasure boat market.