Secure wireless silicon, designed in Kansas.
Mericron is building MCN-1, an American-designed wireless MCU with owner-controlled secure boot and a radio stack customers can inspect and rebuild. The digital trust architecture runs on FPGA today. Integrated RF and production silicon remain under development.
Why Mericron
I am Cole Studer, Mericron's CEO and co-founder. I have used ESP32s and other wireless MCUs for nearly a decade. They are inexpensive, capable, and backed by an ecosystem that makes connected projects easy.
The problem appears when one of those devices must be trusted in a critical environment. The owner cannot inspect or independently verify the firmware running inside the radio. Changing the assembler or wafer fab does not change who designed that firmware or who controls its signing authority.
What began as a Wi-Fi motion-detection side project became much more serious after I attended a reindustrialization event in Detroit. I was holding a Chinese-designed wireless chipset while the companies around me worked to accelerate American production. The mismatch was impossible to ignore, and the founders I met there understood it immediately.
I also help run an AS9100 and ITAR machine shop preparing for CMMC Level 2. In that environment, building long-lived machine monitoring around wireless firmware that cannot be audited is difficult to defend. A supply disruption, new procurement rule, or serious vulnerability can turn one component into a costly product redesign.
If a wireless MCU already combined American design origin, inspectable radio firmware, and owner-controlled secure boot, we would buy it. No catalog part does, and a multi-chip workaround still leaves the radio closed.
Mericron exists because the missing properties have to be designed into the die. MCN-1 gives customers control of the boot authority and is designed around a rebuildable wireless stack. Fixed hardware beneath the firmware constrains RF operation to the certified limits. The baseline manufacturing plan targets GlobalFoundries 22FDX at Fab 8 in New York, followed by American packaging, test, and secure provisioning.
Defense and regulated manufacturers create the first reason to build MCN-1. An open developer community is what can make it useful and sustainable. American semiconductor independence sits underneath every other effort to rebuild domestic industry. If we do not control the chips, we do not fully control the systems built around them.
The digital architecture works. The radio is next.
The FPGA prototype demonstrates the multicore trust boundaries, hybrid secure boot, measured boot, signed attestation, independent application domains, and digital RF policy enforcement.
Integrated RF behavior, package characteristics, power, and production yield remain pre-silicon targets. Current work focuses on the open radio, hostile-firmware testing, regulatory consultation, and 22FDX test silicon.
Read the MCN-1 preliminary specificationBuilt by operators.
Cole Studer
Manufacturing and product operator with experience across wireless systems, electrical engineering, automation, quality, and secure manufacturing. Leads company strategy, MCN-1 product direction, engineering operations, and the open-source developer platform.
Ethan Avalon
Software founder and operator leading business operations, customer development, partnerships, financial planning, and fundraising execution.
Talk to the people doing the work.
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