Mercury Systems has invested $15 million to expand its trusted custom microelectronics business, bringing cutting-edge commercial silicon technology to the Department of Defense (DoD). This technology will be applicable to all defense platforms and programs and offers fast, affordable, secure and trusted chip-scale open system architecture (OSA) devices to accelerate future modernization efforts.
This initiative represents one of the first commercial applications of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s (DARPA) Electronics Resurgence Initiative (ERI) and directly aligns with the ERI’s stated goal of “creating a more specialized, secure, and heavily automated electronics industry that serves the needs of both the domestic commercial and defense sectors.” Combined with Mercury’s industry-leading ‘defense-ready’ processing capabilities for military and aerospace applications, the initiative extends the Company’s strategy to further develop leading-edge technology and manufacturing capabilities in order to bring innovative products and services to valued aerospace and defense industry customers. As the first volume realization of a project of this kind, it reinforces Mercury’s leadership in embedded security, high-performance RF, digital and mixed-signal microelectronics.
This investment will directly address the DoD requirement for made-in-USA microelectronics and equips the warfighter with a state-of-the-art military-grade product, leveraging the most advanced commercial technologies. This is an expansion upon existing investments that began in earnest three years ago, following Mercury’s acquisition of Microsemi’s custom microelectronics business. By leveraging their proven expertise in the world of silicon integration, embedded security, and trusted manufacturing, the company can act as the merchant supplier conduit between the commercial sector and the defense industry to deliver long-term, trusted supply continuity for their valued customers and the DoD.
Mercury has significant expertise in the defense industry and can integrate requisite security with proven silicon fingerprinting capabilities, cryptographic protection capabilities, ITAR requirements implementation, and on-shore silicon integration. When combined with major industry initiatives, such as trusted manufacturing, this chip-scale integration is highly complementary to Mercury’s longstanding expertise in system-scale processing capabilities. For the first time, a single company can provide chip-scale to system-scale processing solutions optimized for increased performance, reduced power, and low latency to meet the rapid growth of massive data processing in edge computing applications such as artificial intelligence.
This expansion sets the stage for the continued accelerating growth of game-changing chiplet technology integration and agile customization ideal for next-generation edge processing applications. Chip scale will enable solutions that would normally be housed on a board or other large-scale system to now be miniaturized onto a single chip in a reliable, secure and trusted manner.
