Mercury Systems, a technology company that delivers mission-critical processing power to the edge, is expanding its portfolio of Direct RF digital signal processing products that use Altera™ Agilex FPGAs to detect and process emissions from a wide portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Direct RF components and modules directly digitize radio frequency signals at the antenna signal frequency, eliminating the analog signal down conversion stages required by legacy hardware. This approach requires extremely fast converters, high-bandwidth digital data links, and powerful real-time digital signal processing. The results are reductions in size, weight, power, cost, and latency that can benefit a variety of radar, communications, electronic warfare, SIGINT, and industrial applications.
In January, Mercury introduced the DRF2580, a playing card-size system-on-module (SOM) based on the Intel Agilex 9 SoC FPGA AGRW014 that converts between analog and digital signals at 64 Gigasamples per second. The company now offers the DRF4580L, a small-form-factor module that incorporates the DRF2580 SOM within a ruggedized, conduction-cooled enclosure that is ready for defense applications. The product comes with Mercury’s Navigator® Board Support Package and FPGA Design Kit that allow customers to develop custom IP for the module that can be installed within hours. Mercury delivered the first DRF4580L unit to a customer in August.
“We continue to innovate to enhance the Mercury Processing Platform and make the latest commercial technologies available to the defense industrial base,” said Ken Hermanny, Mercury’s Vice President of Signal Technologies. “With a growing portfolio of products that make Direct RF spectrum digitization possible, our customers now have more options to deploy this technology to capture, process, and exploit signals at the edge.”
“Altera Agilex 9 SoC FPGAs deliver high-performance RF digitization capabilities in SWAP constrained environments that can now be placed closer to the sensor," said John Sotir, Senior Director, Military Aerospace and Government Business and State-of-the-Art Heterogeneous Integration Packaging (SHIP) at Altera, an Intel Company. "By collaborating with Mercury, a trusted partner in transforming commercial technology for aerospace and defense applications, we are able to deliver this latest technology to our customers developing future radar, electronic warfare, and mission-critical applications."
Mercury plans to showcase the DRF4580L at booth 1642 at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., 2024 September 16-18.
Click here for more information on Mercury's DRF4580L.
