EDGE’s ADVANCED CONCEPTS delivers another success in strengthening the UAE’s sovereign smart weapon supply chain with ESAD 50.
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Press Release, Abu Dhabi, 07 January 2026: ADVANCED CONCEPTS, an EDGE entity dedicated to the design and deployment of advanced, innovative technologies, has achieved a major breakthrough in the development of their Electronic Safety and Arming Device – 50mm (ESAD 50).
Under ADVANCED CONCEPTS’ subsystems portfolio, the company has successfully demonstrated the prototyped ESAD 50’s ability to safely and reliably fire detonators, achieving a technology readiness level 4 (TRL 4). Building on this success, the ESAD 50 will be rapidly developed to TRL 7+ as a smaller, lighter, and feature-rich system before being handed over to EDGE entity HALCON for production in early 2027.
ESADs are used extensively in smart weapon systems to ensure maximum safety in operations, providing an in line explosive train where no mechanisms are needed to be used, which increases reliability and safety. Some safety features of the ESAD 50 include a detonator with specific triggering requirements, powering up in safe mode to ensure there are no accidental triggers, an external trigger to ensure no triggering if not fitted to the defence system, an on-board Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to detect different phases of motion and double check that triggering is safe, and a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) to ensure super reliable triggering logic.
The development of the ESAD 50 highlights the latest milestone in EDGE and its entity’s goal to achieve sovereignty over critical systems and component supply chains, and establish a synergised defence manufacturing ecosystem. ESADs are highly specialised subsystems with only a handful of manufacturers worldwide. Due to their military use, they are subject to tight export restrictions, and even when export is possible, timelines can be lengthy and units can be in short supply.
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