Mercury Introduces New Small Form Factor Digital Signal Processing Module Powered by Altera Agilex FPGAs

ANDOVER, Mass., Sept. 16, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Mercury Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: MRCY, www.mrcy.com), a technology company that delivers mission-critical processing power to the edge, today announced the expansion of its portfolio of Direct RF digital signal processing products that use Altera™ Agilex FPGAs to detect and process emissions from a wide portion of the electromagnetic spectrum.

Direct RF components and modules directly digitize radio frequency signals at the antenna signal frequency, eliminating the analog signal down conversion stages required by legacy hardware. This approach requires extremely fast converters, high-bandwidth digital data links, and powerful real-time digital signal processing. The results are reductions in size, weight, power, cost, and latency that can benefit a variety of radar, communications, electronic warfare, SIGINT, and industrial applications.

In January, Mercury introduced the DRF2580, a playing card-size system-on-module (SOM) based on the Intel Agilex 9 SoC FPGA AGRW014 that converts between analog and digital signals at 64 Gigasamples per second. The company now offers the DRF4580L, a small-form-factor module that incorporates the DRF2580 SOM within a ruggedized, conduction-cooled enclosure that is ready for defense applications. The product comes with Mercury’s Navigator^® Board Support Package and FPGA Design Kit that allow customers to develop custom IP for the module that can be installed within hours. Mercury delivered the first DRF4580L unit to a customer in August.

“We continue to innovate to enhance the Mercury Processing Platform and make the latest commercial technologies available to the defense industrial base,” said Ken Hermanny, Mercury’s Vice President of Signal Technologies. “With a growing portfolio of products that make Direct RF spectrum digitization possible, our customers now have more options to deploy this technology to capture, process, and exploit signals at the edge.”

“Altera Agilex 9 SoC FPGAs deliver high-performance RF digitization capabilities in SWAP constrained environments that can now be placed closer to the sensor," said John Sotir, Senior Director, Military Aerospace and Government Business and State-of-the-Art Heterogeneous Integration Packaging (SHIP) at Altera, an Intel Company. "By collaborating with Mercury, a trusted partner in transforming commercial technology for aerospace and defense applications, we are able to deliver this latest technology to our customers developing future radar, electronic warfare, and mission-critical applications."

The DRF4580L features:

• 6.4" x 6.4" x 1.7" form factor
• Four 64 GSPS A/D and D/A converters 
• Altera Agilex 9 SoC FPGA AGRW014
• 16 GB DDR4 SDRAM 
• Four 100 GigE optical interfaces 
• Ruggedized and conduction-cooled options
• Optional fan kit for table-top development
• FPGA design kit for custom IP development 
• Board Support Package (BSP) for software development 
  

Mercury will be showcasing the DRF4580L at booth 1642 at the Air, Space & Cyber Conference in National Harbor, Md., September 16-18.

Mercury Systems – Innovation that matters^® 
Mercury Systems is a technology company that delivers mission-critical processing power to the edge, making advanced technologies profoundly more accessible for today’s most challenging aerospace and defense missions. The Mercury Processing Platform allows customers to tap into innovative capabilities from silicon to system scale, turning data into decisions on timelines that matter. Mercury’s products and solutions are deployed in more than 300 programs and across 35 countries, enabling a broad range of applications in mission computing, sensor processing, command and control, and communications. Mercury is headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts, and has 23 locations worldwide. To learn more, visit mrcy.com. (Nasdaq: MRCY)

Forward-Looking Safe Harbor Statement 
This press release contains certain forward-looking statements, as that term is defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, including those relating to the Company's focus on enhanced execution of the Company's strategic plan. You can identify these statements by the words “may,” “will,” “could,” “should,” “would,” “plans,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “continue,” “estimate,” “project,” “intend,” “likely,” “forecast,” “probable,” “potential,” and similar expressions. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected or anticipated. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, continued funding of defense programs, the timing and amounts of such funding, general economic and business conditions, including unforeseen weakness in the Company’s markets, effects of any U.S. federal government shutdown or extended continuing resolution, effects of geopolitical unrest and regional conflicts, competition, changes in technology and methods of marketing, delays in or cost increases related to completing development, engineering and manufacturing programs, changes in customer order patterns, changes in product mix, continued success in technological advances and delivering technological innovations, changes in, or in the U.S. government’s interpretation of, federal export control or procurement rules and regulations, changes in, or in the interpretation or enforcement of, environmental rules and regulations, market acceptance of the Company's products, shortages in or delays in receiving components, supply chain delays or volatility for critical components, production delays or unanticipated expenses including due to quality issues or manufacturing execution issues, capacity underutilization, increases in scrap or inventory write-offs, failure to achieve or maintain manufacturing quality certifications, such as AS9100, the impact of supply chain disruption, inflation and labor shortages, among other things, on program execution and the resulting effect on customer satisfaction, inability to fully realize the expected benefits from acquisitions, restructurings, and operational efficiency initiatives or delays in realizing such benefits, challenges in integrating acquired businesses and achieving anticipated synergies, effects of shareholder activism, increases in interest rates, changes to industrial security and cyber-security regulations and requirements and impacts from any cyber or insider threat events, changes in tax rates or tax regulations, changes to interest rate swaps or other cash flow hedging arrangements, changes to generally accepted accounting principles, difficulties in retaining key employees and customers, litigation, including the dispute arising with the former CEO over his resignation, unanticipated costs under fixed-price service and system integration engagements, and various other factors beyond our control. These risks and uncertainties also include such additional risk factors as are discussed in the Company's filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, including its Annual Report on Form 10-K for the fiscal year ended June 28, 2024 and subsequent Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q and Current Reports on Form 8-K. The Company cautions readers not to place undue reliance upon any such forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date made. The Company undertakes no obligation to update any forward-looking statement to reflect events or circumstances after the date on which such statement is made.

INVESTOR CONTACT
David Farnsworth
Chief Financial Officer
David.Farnsworth@mrcy.com

MEDIA CONTACT
Turner Brinton
Senior Director, Corporate Communications
Turner.Brinton@mrcy.com

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