One of the challenges of being “the product guy” here at Mercury is explaining the vast portfolio of products, technologies and solutions that Mercury has to offer and then organizing them in a way so customers can visualize our product breadth. When I receive feedback from our teams who visit customers, there is one constant customer comment they hear: “We had no idea Mercury does that.” And when it is your CEO that hears this from a customer, let’s just say, it’s not a good week for the marketing team. 

We have explored a number of organizing constructs to help simplify our product portfolio. Not too long ago, we introduced a new product menu for our website that places products in two broad categories: “We Build It”—Mercury-built open mission-ready systems, rugged rackmount servers, flight-ready displays, data recorders, radar simulators, etc., and “You Build It”—products our customers use to build their own solutions, including boards, components and software tools. Another simple method we use to communicate our portfolio is “Chip-Scale to System-Scale,” and this past quarter’s new product introductions (NPIs) are a great example of that construct.

Chip-Scale

RFS1140: A disruptive RFSiP for Edge Processing and Electronics Warfare

The RFS1140 is arguably our most important product launch in recent history. Back in the fall of 2019, Mercury announced a significant strategic investment to develop custom, trusted microelectronics components for mission-critical applications. The RFS1140 is a product of that investment and given the current geopolitical environment and supply chain issues (the “chip shortage”), it could not have come soon enough.

The RFS1140 is an RF SiP or “radio frequency system in package.” It basically combines RF components and digital processing into a single silicon package. Many in the industry often refer to SWaP (size, weight and power) optimization, combining the functionality of multiple boards into one, or building a small form factor (SFF) version of a larger system, for example. But Mercury takes it a step further, essentially shrinking a system onto a chip. And not just any system. The RFS1140 combines the latest in digital processing from Xilinx – the Versal Adaptive Compute Acceleration Platform, or ACAP, (read more about that) and provides high-speed digital sampling up to 64 GSPS.

The RFS1140 is a great example of Mercury’s position at the intersection of high-tech and defense, making commercial innovation profoundly more accessible to the aerospace and defense industry. You can read all about the RFS1140 here.      

Modules

We announced five board-level products last quarter.

The FIOVU-2180 and the CIO10-2080 represent the first in the industry safety-certifiable OpenVPX multicore compute blades that incorporate the Xeon D-1700 processor from Intel, delivering processing performance 2-3 times previous generation solutions. These 6U modules will enable system designers to accelerate data-intensive airborne applications such as flight and mission computing, platform management and the increasing use of artificial intelligence for manned and unmanned flight. You can read more about the FIOVU-2180 here and the CIO10-2080 here.

Our FPGA board models 5585 and 5586, announced back in January, represent another industry first – the first open architecture, SOSA aligned 3U OpenVPX modules on the market that feature high-bandwidth memory directly integrated into a Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+ chip. System designers will appreciate the extra performance for compute-intensive electronic warfare, radar and SIGINT systems. You can read about both models here.

In January, we also launched the RFM3202 3U open architecture wideband transceiver to enable spectrum processing for smaller aerospace and defense platforms such as unmanned aerial vehicles, EW electronic attack pods and the space-constrained environment found in seaborne vessels. the SOSA aligned RFM3202 and FPGA Models 5585/5586 mentioned above are examples of Mercury’s commitment to delivering open systems that are vital to the aerospace and defense industry. Read more about the RFM3202 here.

System-Scale

RDP Servers: An industry-first DPU + GPU server

   In late March, we announced a new breed of rugged rackmount servers – the Rugged Distributed Processing series. This range of data-center class servers are designed to provide artificial intelligence and deep learning to applications at the edge. Why does this matter? In A&D, AI can be a game changer for threat assessment and augmenting mission-critical decision making – the types of decisions that can save lives.

The new product line is the first in the industry to combine NVIDIA BlueField data processing unit (DPU) technology with graphics processing unit (GPU) technology in a single rugged server that can be deployed in aircraft, ground vehicles and ships and is designed to address the unique environmental and security requirements of A&D. Read more about the RDP here.

And it does not stop there…

As you can see, it was a busy quarter for the Mercury team. We introduced industry-first chip-scale, module and system-scale products – a testament to our commitment to provide innovation that matters – and as I sit here looking at the NPI schedule for the current quarter, it’s going to be just as busy, so stay tuned!