Mercury Systems Inc. significantly added to its positions in security and RF/microwave technologies with the recent acquisitions of The Athena Group and Syntonic Microwave LLC. These were all-cash transactions totaling $46 million and subject to net working capital and net debt adjustments. The deals, funded by means of Mercury’s existing revolving credit facility, are not expected to have a material impact on the firm’s financial results for the full fiscal year of 2019.
The Athena Group is a privately held company based in Gainesville, Fla. It’s a leading provider of cryptographic and countermeasure intellectual property (IP) for securing defense computing systems. The Athena Group is a leader in differential-power-analysis (DPA) technology and offers a variety of sophisticated security-based technologies meeting Department of Defense (DoD) requirements. Solutions from the Athena group make full use of field-programmable-gate-array (FPGA) and application-specific-integrated-circuit (ASIC) devices to solve the most difficult security challenges and provide defense-based IP for AI, mobile communications, and cloud computing.
Located across the country in Campbell, Calif., Syntonic Microwave is a provider of frequency synthesizers, phase-coherent tuners, and microwave frequency converters for signal-intelligence (SIGINT) and electronic-intelligence (ELINT) applications. The company’s microwave hardware covers frequency ranges to 40 GHz with instantaneous bandwidths as wide as 2 GHz. The systems and subsystems are designed in modular fashion, allowing for rapid adaptation and prototyping according to the requirements of emerging applications, to meet the needs of next-generation electronic-warfare (EW) applications.
This coherent receiver system is an example of the engineering at Mercury Systems, which recently acquired The Athena Group and Syntonic Microwave LLC. (Courtesy of Mercury Systems)
“The acquisitions of Athena and Syntonic represent continued milestones for our market and content expansion strategy,” said Mark Aslett, Mercury’s President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) “Mercury has a long history of collaboration with Athena in protecting critical Defense systems deployed across surface, subsurface, ground, and airborne platforms. Athena’s technologies expand our BuiltSECURE security IP portfolio and extend our leadership in secure embedded computing, positioning us well to capitalize on DoD program protection security requirements for domestic and foreign military sales.”
Aslett added, “Similarly, we believe Syntonic’s deep domain expertise in agile RF technology will expand and enhance our position as the preeminent supplier of high-performance, SWaP-optimized EW subsystems while enabling us to further penetrate the SIGINT and ELINT markets with additional Mercury content. The acquisition of Syntonic gives our defense Prime customers and government agencies access to highly differentiated sensor processing capability, thereby advancing our national interests through domination of the electromagnetic spectrum.”
