Mercury Systems recently announced several contracts for key components in military electronic systems. The first contract, from a prime contractor, is for high-performance microwave transceivers for precision guided munitions. Valued at $10.5 million, the contract was booked during the company’s fiscal fourth quarter of 2017 and is expected to be shipped over the next several quarters (Fig. 1).
“Mercury Systems continues to play a key role in supplying advanced state-of-the-art microelectronic based components and subsystems to our prime customers and the United States Government,” explained Charlie Leader, senior vice president and general manager of Mercury’s Advanced Microelectronics Solutions group.
The second contract, also from a prime contractor, is an $8.5 million follow-on order for high-density, secure memory devices for integration into the computing systems of an advanced military avionics program. As with the first contract, the order was booked in the fiscal fourth quarter of 2017 and is expected to be shipped during the next several quarters.
“This order further reinforces Mercury’s dominant position in the design and manufacturing of secure and trusted memory devices for today’s most SWaP-sensitive military programs,” said Iain Mackie, vice president and general manager of Mercury’s Microelectronics Secure Solutions group. “Our Advanced Microelectronics Centers are privileged to provide long-term supply continuity for affordable, ruggedized, and highly miniaturized memory devices demanded by our military forces around the globe.”
In other news, Hughes Network Systems, LLC has been awarded a Wideband Communications Architecture Study (WCAS) contract to support the U.S. DoD plan for resilient, cost-effective satellite communications (satcom) capabilities. As part of the contract, Hughes will investigate a wide-ranging commercial perspective on how different satellite transports can interoperate for wideband government applications (Fig. 2).
The company will help to create a secure and affordable WCA that can work with different satellite beam configurations and installed platforms, including geosynchronous-earth-orbit (GEO) and low-earth-orbit (LEO) airborne systems. The plan is to allow the DoD’s own waveforms and systems to operate over military networks while also leveraging commercial satellites, gateways, waveforms, and terminals to increase mission assurance.
“This new contract reinforces our growing leadership in efficient defense and intelligence-related high-throughput satellite, ground infrastructure, and automation technologies,” said Rick Lober, vice president and general manager of Hughes’ Defense and Intelligence Systems Division. “Hughes looks forward to supporting the DoD in helping define innovative and interoperable satellite system architectures for flexible and robust network management for contested environments.”
Hughes, the architect of the highly popular JUPITER very-small-aperture-terminal (VSAT) high-throughput-satellite (HTS) system, hopes to make use of a multiple-modem adaptor for interconnecting multiple service providers as part of a WCA solution.
