Ralph Guevarez: Hello and welcome to Mercury Now, a podcast series brought to you by Mercury Systems. I am your host, Ralph Guevarez. And today we are coming to you live from the Association of Old Crow's Symposium and Conference in Washington, DC, where Mercury is showcasing the new SOSA Aligned model 8257A. Joining me at this time is Rodger Hosking, Director of Sales for Mercury Systems. Rodger, good to see you.

Rodger Hosking: Good to be here, Ralph. Thanks.

Ralph Guevarez: So Rodger, tell us why is SOSA so important?

Rodger Hosking: SOSA is now a new DOD initiative that's intended to make insertion of new technology very easy in defense applications. It's intended to reduce costs for the military and to extend the life cycle of equipment.

Ralph Guevarez: Thank you for that, Rodger. Now, what led to the development of the 8257A?

Rodger Hosking: Okay. Every development application requires software development, FPGA development and system development. And this requires the skills and expertise of different types of engineers, different talents, different disciplines. What we wanted to do was to allow each of those specialists in the development cycle to have their own dedicated development system instead of trying to share a large system that often is very complicated with other boards working and also happens to be very expensive. So what the system does here, the 8257A, is it reduces the development system to a single slot chassis with all of the interfaces brought out easily so the developer can have access to them for monitoring during the development process.

Ralph Guevarez: Thank you for that, Rodger. Now what other advantages do the 8257A offer?

Rodger Hosking: Okay. There are 20 different coaxial RF signals that go in and out of our board to connect to the outside world. Those signals are all brought to convenient SMA connectors right on the front panel so that the engineer can easily connect any signal source or take any signal output to the destination that he wants to check. In addition to that, all of the gigabit serial digital IO is brought out to convenient connectors as well. Here, right on the front panel, we have two NPO connectors for two 100 gigabit ethernet optical interfaces. On the back panel, we have connectors for the 10 gigabit ethernet, the 40 gigabit ethernet, and the one gigabit ethernet signals both in copper and in optical, making it really easy for the customer to connect up every single I/O port on the board to the outside world.

Ralph Guevarez: Thank you, Rodger, I appreciate that. Now, what other Mercury SOSA aligned cards does the 8257A support?

Rodger Hosking: We have quite a few of SOSA aligned cards. The two that are the RFSOC family, System on Chip, family are the Model 5550 and the 5553. But we also have two cards in the Vertex Ultra Scale plus family, which are model numbers 5585 and 5586. And we just announced a new card. The Model 5560 that has a versatile HBM high bandwidth memory and PGA processor on it. All of those cards be supported by the 8257A chassis.

Ralph Guevarez: Rodger, I want to take this opportunity to thank you for your time. It's great always having you on the show and Godspeed with the 8257A and look forward to talking to you again.