INDUSTRY
Mercury Provides Silicon IP to Raytheon for its MONARCH Processor
New-generation processor can reconfigure itself to optimize processing on the fly: Mercury Computer Systems announced that it has provided silicon intellectual property (SIP) to Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems for the development of the MONARCH (Morphable Networked Micro-Architecture) fully programmable, system-on-a-chip-processor. 
As announced by Raytheon on March 20, 2007, the MONARCH processor was developed by Raytheon under a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) contract for the Polymorphous Computing Architecture (PCA) program. The program goal is to develop processing architectures that can reconfigure and adapt to mission requirements, such as those in airborne and space radar and global positioning systems, and to reduce mission computing payload adaptation, optimization, and verification times from months and years, to minutes. The MONARCH subcontracting team includes the University of Southern California/Information Sciences Institute, the Georgia Institute of Technology, IBM's Global Engineering Solutions division, and Mercury Computer Systems. Mercury provided its Serial RapidIO(R) IP core with DMA capability, DRAM (dynamic random access memory) control IP, and component middleware. As a complete, high-performance, high-function core with the industry-standard RapidIO interconnect architecture, Mercury's IP core can address a variety of endpoint and switching communications applications. According to Raytheon, the MONARCH processor is the most adaptable processor ever built for the Department of Defense, with exceptional compute capacity, highly flexible data bandwidth capability, and state-of-the-art power efficiency. "We are pleased to work with Raytheon in pioneering the development of this new-generation processor, with its unique ability to reconfigure and optimize processing on the fly," said Mark Skalabrin, Vice President and General Manager of the Advanced Solutions business at Mercury Computer Systems. "Mercury's broad range of IP solutions addresses a growing number of data-intensive requirements, such as those targeted for the MONARCH processor, in both commercial and defense applications."