Mercury Systems Profile
Mercury Systems, Inc. (Mercury) is a technology company that delivers processing power for the most demanding aerospace and defense missions.
The company’s end-to-end processing platform enables a broad range of aerospace and defense programs, optimized for mission success in some of the most challenging and demanding environments. Processing technologies that comprise the company’s platform include signal solutions, display, software applications, networking, storage and secure processing. The company’s innovative solutions are mission-ready, software-defined and open and modular, meeting its customers’ cost and schedule needs today by allowing them to use or modify its products to suit their mission. Customers access the company’s solutions via the Mercury Processing Platform, which encompasses the broad scope of its investments in technologies, companies, products, services and the expertise of its people. Ultimately, the company connects its customers to what matters most to them. The company connects commercial technology to defense, people to data and partners to opportunities. At the most human level, the company connects what it does to its customers’ missions; supporting the people for whom safety, security and protecting freedom are of paramount importance.
As a leading manufacturer of essential components, products, modules and subsystems, the company sells to defense prime contractors, the U.S. government and original equipment manufacturers (OEM) commercial aerospace companies. Mercury has built a trusted, robust portfolio of proven product solutions, leveraging the most advanced commercial silicon technologies and purpose-built to exceed the performance needs of the company’s defense and commercial customers. Customers add their own applications and algorithms to the company’s specialized, secure and innovative products and pre-integrated solutions. This allows them to complete their full system by integrating with their platform, the sensor technology and, increasingly, the processing from Mercury. The company’s products and solutions are deployed in more than 300 programs with over 25 different defense prime contractors and commercial aviation customers.
Mercury’s transformational business model accelerates the process of making new technology profoundly more accessible to the company’s customers by bridging the gap between commercial technology and aerospace and defense applications on time constraints that matter. The company’s long-standing deep relationships with leading high-tech and other commercial companies, coupled with its high level of research and development (R&D) investments on a percentage basis of sales and industry-leading trusted and secure design and manufacturing capabilities, are the foundational tenets of this highly successful model. The company is a leading the development and adaptation of commercial technology for aerospace and defense solutions. From chip-scale to system scale and from data, including radio frequency (RF) to digital to decision, the company makes mission-critical technologies safe, secure, affordable and relevant for its customers.
The company’s capabilities, technology, people and R&D investment strategy combine to differentiate Mercury in its industry. The company maintains its technological edge by investing in critical capabilities and intellectual property (IP or building blocks) in processing, leveraging open standards and open architectures to adapt quickly those building blocks into solutions for highly data-intensive applications, including emerging needs in areas ,such as artificial intelligence (AI).
The company’s mission critical solutions are deployed by its customers for a variety of applications including command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR), electronic intelligence, mission computing avionics, electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR), electronic warfare, weapons and missile defense, hypersonics and radar.
1MPACT
On August 3, 2021, Mercury announced a companywide effort, called 1MPACT, to lay the foundation for the next phase of the company’s value creation at scale.
1MPACT was always intended to be a multi-year journey where Mercury builds on its operational competence until the behaviors and practices that came with 1MPACT simply become the way Mercury operates. On July 18, 2023, Mercury executed the planned evolution of the company’s 1MPACT value creation initiative, embedding the processes and execution of 1MPACT into the company’s Execution Excellence organization. The 1MPACT office has concluded its responsibilities, having successfully incorporated the principles behind 1MPACT into how Mercury thinks about continuous improvement at all levels of the organization.
Business Strategy
Mercury’s business strategy is based on a differentiated market position: the company makes trusted, secure, mission critical technologies profoundly more accessible to the aerospace and defense industry. The Mercury Processing Platform serves customers with cutting-edge commercial technology innovations, purpose built and mission-ready for aerospace and defense applications, through above average industry investment on a percentage basis in R&D. The company’s strategy is built to meet the aerospace and defense market’s need for speed and affordability.
The company’s ability to continue to improve its performance and deliver results demands it all aligns around the few actions that unlock the intrinsic value in the business. As such, the company will focus on areas that unlock its capacity to create value and reinvest for growth include delivering Predictable Results; and building a Thriving Organic Growth Engine.
The company’s strategies are built around its key strengths as a leading commercial technology company serving the aerospace and defense industry. The company’s strategies include innovation and investment in scaling existing capabilities, as well as augmenting its capabilities through an acquisition strategy designed to focus on adjacent technologies.
As a result, the company has successfully penetrated strategic programs including Aegis, Patriot, Lower Tier Air & Missile Defense Sensor (LTAMDS), Surface Electronic Warfare Improvement Program (SEWIP), Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD), Predator, F-35, Reaper, F-18, F-16 SABR, E2-D Hawkeye, Paveway, Filthy Buzzard, PGK, P-8, Advanced Integrated Defensive Electronic Warfare Suite (AIDEWS), Common Display System (CDS), Aviation Mission Common Server (AMCS) and WIN-T.
The company is committed to continued investment and innovation in advanced new products and solutions development to maintain its competitive advantage, including in the fields of RF, analog-to-digital and digital-to-analog conversion, advanced multi- and many-core sensor processing systems including graphics processing units (GPUs), safety-critical design and engineering, processing for AI, embedded security, digital storage, digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) solutions, software-defined communications capabilities and advanced security technologies and capabilities. Concurrently, the company leverages its engineering and development capabilities, including systems integration, to accelerate its strategy to become a commercial outsourcing partner to the large defense prime contractors as they seek the more rapid design, development and delivery of affordable, commercially-developed, open architecture solutions within the markets it serves. The company invests in scalable manufacturing operations in the U.S. to enable deployment of its microelectronics and secure processing solutions to its customers.
The company’s commercial business model positions it to be compensated for non-recurring engineering which supplements its own internal R&D investment. The company typically teams concurrently with multiple defense prime contractors as they pursue new business with solutions they develop and market to the government, and engage with its customers early in the design cycle. The company’s engagement model can lead to long-term production revenue that continues after the initial services are delivered.
Solutions and Products
The company delivers technology at the intersection of the high-tech and defense industries. The Mercury difference is driven by key differentiators the company promises to deliver to all of its customers: Mission-Ready; Trusted and Secure; Software-Defined; and Open and Modular.
Mission-Ready: Fit for purpose to meet the demanding needs of the company’s customers' missions. Advanced thermal management and rugged packaging technology ensures optimal performance and reliable operation in the most challenging environments on earth and beyond. The company delivers extended reliability and dependability through thermal management, component selection, environmental protection and testing.
Trusted and Secure: A trusted supply chain, with products designed and manufactured onshore. Advanced cryptography, secure boot and physical protection technologies like the company’s BuiltSECURE technology can mitigate reverse engineering, deliver cyber resiliency and safeguard confidential data and IP against adversarial threats, even when a system has been compromised. The company also designs safety-certifiable BuiltSAFE processing systems up to the highest design assurance levels.
Software-Defined: Software enabled hardware for future proofing, rapid scaling, ease of maintenance and affordability. Flexible hardware architectures that are reconfigurable and upgradeable with software to extend the life of the company’s systems and the platforms they are deployed on. The company’s model-based systems engineering (MBSE) design approach aims to significantly decrease the time and cost involved in developing and deploying military and aerospace platforms.
Open and Modular: Plug and play, upgradeable and scalable. A modular, open, systems architecture (MOSA) approach to system design maximizes technology reuse to dramatically reduce development time and cost. This open systems approach mitigates obsolescence risk while emphasizing commonality, interoperability and sustainability across platforms and domains.
The Mercury Processing Platform is designed to meet the full range of requirements in compute-intensive, signal processing, image processing and command and control applications. To maintain a competitive advantage, the company seeks to leverage technology investments across multiple product lines and product solutions. Examples of hardware products include small, custom microelectronics, embedded sensor processing subsystems, RF and microwave components, modules and subsystems, rugged servers and avionics mission computers.
The company’s products are typically compute-intensive and require extremely high bandwidth and high throughput. These systems often must also meet significant size, weight and power (SWaP) constraints for use in aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), ships and other platforms and be ruggedized for use in harsh environments. They are primarily used in both commercial aerospace applications, such as communications and ground radar air traffic control, as well as advanced defense and intelligence applications, including space-time adaptive processing, synthetic aperture radar, airborne early warning, command, control, communication and information systems, mission planning, image intelligence and signal intelligence systems. The company’s products transform the massive streams of digital data created in these applications into usable information in real time. The systems can scale from a few processors to thousands of processors.
The company groups its products into the following categories:
Components: Components represent the basic building blocks of an electronic system. They generally perform a single function, such as switching, storing or converting electronic signals. Some examples include power amplifiers and limiters, switches, oscillators, filters, equalizers, digital and analog converters, chips, MMICs (monolithic microwave integrated circuits) and memory and storage devices.
Modules and Subassemblies: Modules and sub-assemblies combine multiple components to serve a range of complex functions, including processing, networking and graphics display. Typically delivered as computer boards or other packaging, modules and sub-assemblies are usually designed using open standards to provide interoperability when integrated in a subsystem. Examples of modules and sub-assemblies include embedded processing boards, switched fabrics and boards for high-speed input/output, digital receivers, graphics and video, along with multi-chip modules, integrated radio frequency and microwave multi-function assemblies and radio frequency tuners and transceivers.
Integrated Subsystems: Integrated subsystems bring components, modules and/or sub-assemblies into one system, enabled with software. Subsystems are typically, but not always, integrated within an open standards-based chassis and often feature interconnect technologies to enable communication between disparate systems. Spares and replacement modules and sub-assemblies are provided for use with subsystems sold by the company. Its subsystems are deployed in sensor processing, aviation and mission computing and C4I applications.
By providing pre-integrated subsystems to its customers, the company enables them to rapidly and cost-effectively port and adapt their applications to changing threats. This approach also saves the company’s customers valuable time and expense, as their initial costs to integrate modules and components typically far exceed the costs of the individual product procurement. This benefit continues over time because the company is continually investing R&D into its products. This allows the company to provide its customers the latest technologies in its pre-integrated subsystems faster than they can typically do it themselves.
To address the challenges facing the warfighter, its government and defense prime contractors, the company has developed a new product architecture that supports a more dynamic, iterative, spiral development process by leveraging open architecture standards and leading-edge commercial technologies and products. The company’s open architecture is carried throughout its entire product line from the very small form-factor subsystems to the high-end, where ultimate processing power and reliability is of paramount importance to the mission. The company’s commercially-developed product capabilities cover the entire intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) spectrum from acquisition and digitization of the signal, to processing of the signal, through the exploitation and dissemination of the information. The company works continuously to improve its hardware technology with an eye toward optimization of SWaP demands.
The company partners with global tech leaders to align technology roadmaps and deliver cutting-edge computing in scalable, field-deployable form factors that are fully configurable to each unique workload. The company uses the latest Intel server-class processing products, AMD Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA), as well as NVIDIA GPU products in its embedded high-performance processing technologies. While this multi-computing and embedded processing technology is one of the company’s core capabilities, the SWaP constraints inherent in high-performance embedded processing applications create unique challenges. For example, to deal with the heat build-up involved in fanless compact rugged subsystems, the company introduced a key technology called Air Flow-By that enables previously unattainable levels of processing power within a small footprint by effectively removing heat so server-class processors can perform at maximum designed power limits. In environments where air is limited, such as high-altitude operations, its Liquid-Flow-By technology allows maximum server-class processor performance. These innovative cooling techniques allow full performance server-class processing in rugged environments enabling new and advanced modes of operation that enhance the multi-intelligence, situational awareness and electronic warfare capabilities in military platforms.
Embedded systems security has become a requirement for new and emerging military programs and the company’s security solutions are a critical differentiator from its traditional competition. These security solutions, combined with the company’s next-generation secure Intel server-class product line, together with increasingly frequent mandates from the government to secure electronic systems for domestic and foreign military sales, position it well to capitalize on DoD program protection security requirements. Finally, the company’s built-in security framework creates higher product differentiation, and drives greater program velocity, while lowering risk.
Open Standards Support
Mercury has a long history of driving modular open systems architectures and has remained committed to creating, advancing and adopting open standards for all the company’s products, from its smallest components and connectors to its largest, high-performance, integrated multi-computer systems. With forty years of technology leadership within the high-performance embedded computing industry, the company has pioneered or contributed to the development of many of the defense industry’s emerging open standards, including standards, such as RACEway, RapidIO, VXS, VPX, REDI and notably OpenVPX. These open standards allow system integrators to benefit from the interoperability of modules produced by multiple vendors. The company also continues to be influential in the industry-standards organizations associated with its market segments. As a member of the VMEbus International Trade Association (VITA), the Sensor Open Systems Architecture (SOSA) initiative, the Future Airborne Capability Environment (FACE) consortium and the Vehicular Integration for C4ISR/EW Interoperability (VICTORY) consortium, among other standards bodies, Mercury is helping to guide the aerospace and defense industry toward greater openness and vendor interoperability, consistent with the DoD’s focus on using MOSA in major programs.
The company’s software is based on open standards and includes heterogeneous processor support with extensive highly-optimized math libraries, multi-computing switch fabric support, net-centric and system management enabling services, extended operating system services, board support packages and development tools. This software platform delivers on the performance required for highly tuned real-time operation with the flexibility of open standards that are an essential ingredient of technology insertion and software life-cycle support.
As the U.S. government mandates more outsourcing and open standards, a major shift is occurring within the defense prime contractor community towards procurement of integrated subsystems that enable quick application level porting through standards-based methodologies. By leveraging its open architecture and high-performance modular product set, the company provides defense prime contractors with rapid deployment and quick reaction capabilities through its professional services and systems integration offerings.
Commitment to Deliver Uncompromised
For Mercury, this means ensuring the company’s products and solutions have not been and cannot be tampered with, and that what it delivers to its customers is not compromised at any point during the development lifecycle, from procurement to manufacturing. The company’s holistic approach to deliver uncompromised includes vigorously mitigating potential insider threats; proactively protecting its IT infrastructure with strong cybersecurity defenses; effectively managing and assessing its suppliers’ controls; and judiciously controlling design information through the entire development process.
The company is investing in digital transformation, insider trust, cybersecurity, supply chain management and trusted microelectronics, all integral to its commitment to being a leader in delivering uncompromised solutions to its customers.
Through its commercially developed, specialized processing subsystem solutions, the company addresses the challenges associated with the collection and processing of massive, continuous streams of data and dramatically shorten the time that it takes to give information to the U.S. armed forces at the tactical edge. The company’s solutions are specifically designed for flexibility and interoperability, allowing its products to be easily integrated into larger system-level solutions. The company’s ability to integrate subsystem-level capabilities allows it to provide solutions that effectively address the mission-critical challenges within the C4ISR market, including multi-intelligence data fusion and AI processing onboard the platform. The company leverages its deep expertise in embedded multicomputing, embedded sensor processing, with the addition of its RF microwave and millimeter subsystems and components, along with strategic investments in research and development to provide solutions across the sensor processing chain.
The company’s products and solutions have been deployed on more than 300 different programs and over 25 different defense prime contractors. The company serves high priority markets for the DoD and foreign militaries, such as UAVs, ballistic missile defense, guided missiles and precision munitions, airborne reconnaissance, electronic warfare and has secured positions on mission-critical programs, including Aegis, Predator and Reaper UAVs, F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, LTAMDS, Patriot missile, SEWIP and Paveway. In addition, the company consistently leverages its technology and capabilities across multiple programs, providing significant operating leverage and cost savings. The company’s acquisitions allow it to participate in a broader array of programs, many with key strategic customers of its.
The company has a portfolio of Open Standards Architecture (OSA) technology building blocks across the entire sensor processing chain. The company offers embedded secure processing capabilities with advanced packaging and cooling technologies that ruggedize commercial technologies while allowing them to stay cool for reliable operation. These capabilities allow the company to help its customers meet the demanding SWaP requirements of today’s defense platforms. The company’s pre-integrated subsystems improve affordability by substantially reducing customer system integration costs and time-to-market for its solutions. The company’s pre-integrated solutions approach allows for more rapid and affordable modernization of existing platforms and faster deployment of new platforms.
The company offers secure processing expertise that is built-in to its pre-integrated subsystems. By doing this it is able to provide secure building blocks that allow its customers to also incorporate their own security capabilities. This assists the company’s customers in ensuring program protection as they deploy critical platforms and programs, all in support of DoD missions. The acquisition of the Carve-Out Business brought the company new security technologies and also allowed it to provide enhanced security capabilities in areas, such as memory and storage devices. The company’s acquisitions of the Carve-Out Business, LIT and Athena also added to its portfolio of sophisticated firmware and software specifically designed to secure microelectronic devices that can be leveraged across its product portfolio.
The DoD and the defense industrial base is undergoing a major transformation. Domestic political and budget uncertainty, geopolitical instability and evolving global threats have become constants. The defense budget remains under pressure and R&D and technology spending are often in budgetary competition with the increasing costs of military personnel requirements, health care costs and other important elements within the DoD and the federal budget generally.
The company has established long-standing relationships with defense prime contractors, the U.S. government and other key organizations in the defense industry over its 30 years in the defense electronics industry. The company’s top customers include Airbus, BAE Systems, Boeing, General Atomics, General Dynamics, L3Harris Technologies, Leonardo, Lockheed Martin Corporation, Northrop Grumman Corporation, RTX Corporation and the U.S. Navy. Over this period, the company has become recognized for its ability to develop new technologies and meet stringent program requirements.
Research and Product Development
The company’s total expenditures for research and development amounted to $108.8 million for the year ended June 30, 2023.
Customers
RTX Corporation consists of 14% of the company’s revenue for the year ended June 30, 2023 (fiscal year 2023). Lockheed Martin consists of 13% of the company’s revenues for the year ended June 30, 2023. The United States Navy consists of less than 10% of the company’s revenues for the year ended June 30, 2023. Northrop Grumman accounted for 11% of the company’s revenues for the year ended June 30, 2023.
History
Mercury Systems, Inc. was founded in 1981. The company was incorporated in Massachusetts in 1981.
