MERL acts as North American arm of Mitsubishi's Corporate R&D organization and is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States.

This consolidated all of Mitsubishi Electric’s North American research into one organization, creating the MERL that exists today.

[1] László Bélády was the head of MERL from 1991 to 1998,[4][5] James D. Foley, who co-authored many of the most widely used university textbooks on computer graphics, was the president from 1998 to 1999.

MERL conducts application motivated basic research and advanced development in • Electronics & Communications: Wireless and optical communications, advanced signal processing, optical and semiconductor devices, and electro-magnetics, RF& Power • Multimedia: Efficient acquisition, representation, processing, security, and interaction of multimedia.

• Spatial Analysis: Processing data from across space and time to extract meaning and build representations of objects and events in the world.