This spring Mercury Systems acquired Pentek, a designer of FPGA single-board computers, data-acquisition boards, recording systems, and other products for radar, signals intelligence (SIGINT), and electronic warfare (EW) applications. In this podcast, Neal Austin, Vice President and General Manager of the Mixed Signal Business Unit within Mercury Systems and Rodger Hosking, co-founder and VP of Pentek Systems deep dive into the acquisition, where Pentek will fit within Mercury, and how the acquisition impacts the Mercury efforts within the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) Consortium. They also cover design trends in the radar and electronic warfare markets,  commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) procurement, the impact AI and 5G will have on military electronics, and tackle the engineering recruitment challenges defense companies face.

ANDOVER, Mass. Mercury Systems has launched a new line of safety-certifiable 3U OpenVPX SOSA aligned avionics modules that are aimed at accelerating critical avionics applications and streamlining subsystem development and platform safety certification.

ANDOVER, Mass. Mercury Systems has announced the EnsembleSeries HDS6705 blade server, a powerful, general-purpose processing 6U OpenVPX blade server with built-in security for extremely demanding defense and aerospace applications.

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.