TrellisWare Technologies, Inc.

TrellisWare exists because a satellite company had signal processing work with nowhere terrestrial to put it. Four engineers spun the business out of Viasat in 2000 to take that work to ground radios, and Viasat still holds a majority stake, with the unit sitting inside the Defense and Advanced Technologies segment. The relationship is closer than a normal investment. TrellisWare declared a cash dividend of $155.7 million in June 2025, of which Viasat's share was $96 million, which is roughly how the split works out. San Diego remains the base, with somewhere in the range of two to three hundred staff.

Waveforms are the product the company is known for. TSM, its scalable mobile networking waveform, carries voice, video, data and position location on a single radio frequency channel and now runs on more than 200,000 radios worldwide by the company's own count. Underneath it sits Barrage Relay, a cooperative relaying technique the company patented and describes as flight proven. The waveform catalogue has widened since. Katana narrowband and wideband variants and the WREN narrowband and WREN TSM waveforms give customers options between range, throughput and spectrum footprint, and the earlier TSM-X branding went into a US Special Operations Command handheld radio programme of record in 2015.

Radios split into two families. Critical communication covers the TW Shadow 950 handheld and vehicular set running TSM and Katana across UHF, L band and S band at up to 16 Mbps, the lower cost TW Shadow 750, the TW Shadow 135 high power radio, the TW-145 digital radio head and the TW Spirit 860 soldier worn set combining a wideband mesh with a narrowband mode built to resist jamming. TW Ghost 875 is a portable relay with its own battery. Embeddable communication covers the TW Ghost 870, 880 and 881 modules for unmanned aircraft and ground vehicles, the TW-310 datalink module and the TW Shadow 650 core board. Legacy hardware such as the TW-400 CUB, which holds a NIST cryptographic module validation, and the TW-600 Ocelot embedded module still turns up in the field. Advanced technologies work runs alongside all of it, covering free space optics, interference cancellation and licensing of forward error correction cores. Software apps include a network controller, TW Connect, TSM management and download tools and a configuration plugin for ATAK.

The markets are government and defense, commercial solutions, public safety and international customers. Army work carries the most weight. TSM was fielded across every tactical radio in Integrated Tactical Network Capability Set 21, it is the advanced networking waveform on the two channel Leader Radio programme covering the Thales AN/PRC-148C and the L3Harris AN/PRC-163, and it was integrated into a card based Capability Set 23 solution demonstrated on Stryker. Special Operations Command awarded a $40 million contract in 2017, the FBI added a place on a $100 million mesh networking vehicle the same year, and unmanned integrations reach from the Lockheed Martin Indago 3 to the Aeryon SkyRanger.