Here are the notes.
Meeting notes from 12/8/99 with Mercury Computer Systems (Gary Olin)
Jay Bertelli founded Mercury after leaving Analogic in the 1980?s. Analogic was an early provider of high-performance computing systems that were designed and built as array processors (sort of like the large-scale equivalent of a math co-processor in the early PC models).
There is a fundamental difference between the way that DSP?s have to process data and processing business data. DSP?s have to be able to process a massive amount of data in real-time. An analogy that is commonly used to describe this is ?drinking from a firehose?. For example, when a sensor is turned on and the data starts flooding in, the DSP has to process this data as it arrives ? requiring both enormous processing power and equally as important, very high communications bandwidth. The data must be processed and moved at an unrelenting, breakneck pace.
Mercury decided that the standard approach to addressing this requirement, array processors, had a legacy problem that would prevent them from achieving greater levels of performance. This bottleneck consisted of a single shared resource ? the bus. It was clear that an alternative to the bus was necessary. A high-speed interconnection was needed to replace the bus. This was developed as the RACEway switched fabric interconnect.
Around the time that Gary Olin came on board at Mercury, in 1995, the RACEway architecture had just been accepted as an ANSI standard. At first, it was not clear why a company would take what one would assume to be proprietary, competitive information and put it out in the public domain. The result of that move is that there are now over 60 commercial products that are RACEway compatible. Although one of their competitors subsequently also got their own unique architecture published as a standard, being ?first to market? here was clearly a major benefit.
While the business back in those days was primarily a component business ? selling boards, today it is predominantly a systems business.
Prior to the availability of newest PowerPC processors (of which AltiVec is the latest), the systems produced were heterogeneous processor platforms. For example, a system they built recently included 978 processors. The vast majority of the processors are Analog Devices DSP chips (Shark). Other processors were PowerPC?s - to handle the non-DSP functions for the system. Today, the system could be built with only one type of processor, AltiVec ? as it can deliver all the required performance density while simultaneously simplifying programming for the system, reducing the cost, power, footprint and cooling requirements.
There are five drivers of growth for the company:
 An insatiable appetite for more power in smaller footprints.
 Rapid technological evolution with shorter product life-cycles.
 The trend from doing things in-house to outsourcing
 New market opportunities to convert analog data to digital
 Dominance of the Mercury RACE architecture.
The Intel i860 used to rule the market for embedded systems and is still a dominant processor but has been surpassed in performance by contemporary microprocessors like the PPC.
GE is Mercury?s client for medical imaging systems. They are working together on their 4th generation system.
The value that Mercury brings to their customers is not hardware. The real value is their expertise in solving the types of problems that requires their hardware. In other words, they don?t just sell boxes, they insure that the customers problems get solved using their boxes. That is why the customers are happy to pay the hardware premiums, because the services are included in the hardware price ? and the customers are comfortable with that value proposition.
A key design consideration for embedded systems that are intended for use on airborne platforms is that they need to be as small as possible. When you build very dense embedded systems, you have heat dissipation challenges because you are packing the componentry into as small a space as possible. In a sealed environment like an aircraft at high-altitude, this presents some serious engineering challenges. AltiVec has a role to play here too, because it enables them to deliver systems with far greater capabilities in a smaller footprint.
These systems are enabling the users to do more and more on-board and in-mission. Instead of just collecting the data to be analyzed later, now some analysis can be done in real-time.
Some of Mercury?s technology is used for radar systems. Mercury has developed technology that enables them to see through foliage?and right into the ground. Buried land mines that have a 2-inch square piece of metal in them can be detected from the air.
Recently, a test was successfully conducted that demonstrated the use of an ATM link from an aircraft, through a satellite to a ground station. This has implications for being able to move the data from the aircraft to the ground for further analysis without having to wait until the aircraft returns to base.
Medical Imaging
Using Mercury?s medical imaging technology, a series of CT scans can be taken and reconstructed into a 3-D image. For example, a physician using this technology was able to rapidly construct a 3-D model of the arteries surrounding a patient?s heart. He could then rotate the model to see it from any angle. When the suspected blockage was detected, he was then able to ?fly through? the artery and right up to the blockage. All of this without raising a scalpel.
Previously, these scans took from 10 to 20 minutes. Using the new Mercury technology, a full body scan can be done in 20 seconds. This can make a huge difference for a trauma patient in the emergency room. The physicians get better data, faster. Which means better decisions, lower fatality rates, reduced insurance costs ? everybody wins.
It is anticipated that Mercury can play a substantial role in the rapidly emerging digital cardiology market.
Revenues in the medical imaging business are increasing at a much faster rate than in their more mature defense electronics business.
Digital Wireless
This is where I learned something new about Mercury. Mercury is looking at the explosion in the population of mobile telephone subscribers and the dawning age of wireless data as a major opportunity. The base stations that will be required to support 3G networks will need to have enormous processing power. In fact, the situation resembles a battlefield. You have to keep track of thousands of objects and each of them is moving at varying speeds along individual trajectories ? and you have to do it in real-time.
Right now the industry is still stuck in the mentality that they have to build it themselves, but Mercury feels strongly that they can make a compelling case that developing this capability should be outsourced (to Mercury, of course). Their expertise in defense electronics can be brought directly to bear on this problem and is another example of where defense spending ends up subsidizing or benefiting consumers.
Digital Television
Mercury?s foray into the digital television broadcasting arena is being done through Agilevision. Agilevision is an LLC that is a joint venture between Sarnoff and Mercury. Broadcasting video is another high-bandwidth stream of data that represents a significant signal processing application. Mercury?s expertise established in defense electronics is being brought directly to bear on this area.
Sarnoff is a critical strategic partner for this effort. Sarnoff is responsible for pushing the US towards digital television. The US was stalled for a long time on this because there was no agreement on any of the 23 different formats that were being promoted for DTV. This is a very risky situation for broadcasters because they do not know which format will succeed, yet the government has put a gun to their heads and demanded the delivery of DTV over the next few years.
Broadcasters are still adjusting to the new realities and have not fully realized that they are in the content delivery business. They are essentially a delivery service for advertisers.
In 2006, the broadcasters have to give spectrum back to the government. They have been told that they must invest in DTV, but there is a disincentive for doing so. Mercury hopes to ease this transition by providing DTV Station in a Box. This will enable broadcasters to begin delivering DTV without incurring the risk of commiting to a particular format. The Mercury solution will be able to deliver any format, and in a way that enables broadcasters to scale up these capabilities easily and inexpensively.
This technology will be displayed at the NAB show in April. With Sarnoff as their partner, Mercury is extremely well-positioned. Sarnoff pulled together the Grand Alliance to drive DTV forward and wrote all the standards. The CEO of Agilevision came from Sony.
Digital Cinema
Another area I did not realize that Mercury was investigating. Mercury says that digital cinema is inevitable. It is coming for sure, the only question is when and in what shape. What we will have is end-to-end digital processing. From creation, through production to distribution and consumption. The economics are compelling (unlike DTV). Mercury is working on this effort with their partners, including DemoGraFX and Sarnoff. |
