Mercury Systems, Inc. is investing $15 million in microelectronics to help fill a government need for trusted components.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Department of Defense has raised concerns in recent years over foreign-built microelectronics, noting that adversaries with access to foreign-built microelectronics could install malware and bugs on those products. The nightmare scenario, according to Bill Conley, Mercury\u2019s senior vice president and chief technology officer, would be a kill switch that would allow that government to shut down those microelectronics at the start of a conflict, rendering a weapons systems useless or unreliable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DARPA\u2019s Electronics Resurgence Initiative is an attempt to address this growing concern by creating a more specialized, secure, and automated industry for the domestic commercial and defense sectors. According to Mercury, their spending is one of the first commercial applications of that effort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThis investment directly addresses the DoD requirement for made-in-USA microelectronics and equips the warfighter with a state-of-the-art military-grade product, leveraging the most advanced commercial technologies,\u201d said Mark Aslett, Mercury\u2019s president and chief executive, in a statement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The $15 million will be used to expand a facility in Phoenix, Arizona, so the company can build the custom microelectronics for the government at scale. Mercury began investing in the field three years ago with the company\u2019s acquisition of Microemi\u2019s custom microelectronics business.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn Phoenix, where we have our microelectronics advanced state of the art center, we\u2019re expanding the clean rooms there in order to take all these disparate capabilities from the commercial industry and defense and integrate them into those packages,\u201d said Thomas Smelker, Mercury\u2019s vice president and general manager.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Conley said the company\u2019s aim is to become the first that can provide trusted chip-scale to system-scale processing solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The investment in their Phoenix facility will allow them to build the trusted microelectronics the Department of Defense needs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":26764,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":59,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":{"10":{"categories":["industry","daily-news-roundup","newsletters","digital-show-daily"],"primary_category":"industry"}}},"categories":[59,106,29,13,32,25],"tags":[],"coauthors":[3143],"class_list":["post-20444","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ausa","category-daily-brief","category-home","category-industry","category-newsletters","category-show-reporter"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"F77JAE4OXJCUXDSZDDFIGJY7HM","arc_canonical_url":"\/show-reporter\/ausa\/2019\/10\/15\/why-mercury-is-investing-15m-in-microelectronics-production\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n