ANDOVER, Mass.  Mercury Systems, Inc., continuing its run of acquisitions, purchased Pentek Technologies, LLC and Pentek Systems, Inc. (collectively, “Pentek”) in Upper Saddle River, N.J., for an all-cash purchase price of $65 million. Pentek, a competitor to Mercury's embedded signal-processing business, designs software-defined radio (SDR) solutions, FPGA single-board computers, data-acqusition boards, recording systems, and other products for radar, signals intelligence (SIGINT), electronic warfare (EW), and other high-performance defense applications.

ANDOVER, Mass. and MUNICH, Germany. Mercury Systems and Airbus Defence and Space announced that they will cooperate in the area of autonomous and flight-control computer programs.

The advent of unmanned systems reflects a huge aspect of warfare – that of protecting the warfighter – through the development of platforms that can be operated by humans from a distance, keeping them out of harm’s way. Some of these platforms are actually on the way to becoming fully autonomous. Hurdles in the way of both manufacturers and end users include interoperability and cost-efficiency. Although these hurdles are challenging, organizations including The Open Group and corresponding consortia have made noticeable strides to standardize in an effort to universalize otherwise complex unmanned systems.

ANDOVER, Mass. Mercury Systems, Inc. has launched the Rappid spectrum processing platform, a modular open system architecture designed to accelerate the development of electronic warfare (EW), signal intelligence, and software-defined radio applications.

ANDOVER, Mass. Solid-state data recorders (SSDRs) built by Mercury Systems will fly to the International Space Station in 2022, after selection by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to provide for NASA’s Earth Surface Mineral Dust Source Investigation (EMIT) science mission.

By Tom Smelker

Today’s sensor-based systems often fail to perform at their full potential due to loss of fidelity in data processing or discarding data due to analog bandwidth limitations from the performance trade-offs required to meet size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints. In addition, the most effective radar and electronic warfare (EW) response techniques demand extremely low latency as the signal transitions from analog RF to digital and back to RF. Heterogeneous 2.5D system-in-package (SiP) technology, a new trend in microelectronics that includes multiple die inside the same package, is proving to be an excellent match for sensor-edge processing requirements, as it integrates high-performance chiplets to support direct digitization of wideband RF signals.

Threats facing the U.S. military are evolving fast – hypersonically fast. At speeds of MACH 5 and greater, hypersonic weapons are becoming increasingly challenging to detect, deter, and destroy. Military-technology manufacturers, however, are refusing to let these light-speed advancements become the Achilles heel for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD). The methods through which companies in the hypersonic sector plan to ensure domestic confidence in this arena are said to be dependent on innovations like early detection, robust sensor systems, and a better understanding of what exactly makes a hypersonic weapon so lethal.