Jean-François Morizur, Founder and CEO of France-based photonics components and systems developer, Cailabs, concurs. But I think companies welcome the challenge and the market potential is encouraging many to be innovative." ‘A solution beyond radio' "Solutions include designing modular systems that can be put together without a lot of expertise and adding as much automation as possible - which isn't simple given the tight tolerances of optics. "Companies are getting squeezed in terms of cost of flight transceiver, manufacturing times and delivering higher data rates than ever before," he says. Still, as Hemmati points out volume manufacturing is an issue for everyone and component costs need to drop substantially. Meanwhile businesses such as SpaceX and Amazon are also developing optical transceivers inhouse. Bryan S Robinson of MIT Lincoln Lab, companies already providing optical transceivers for flight include SA Photonics, US, and Germany's Tesat Spacecom and Mynaric. "In the past, the market has only required a handful of optical transceivers every year but given the growing constellations of satellites in low Earth-orbit, this is now scaling to thousands per year."Īccording to Hemmati, who opened the Photonics West Free-Space Laser Communication session with Dr. Hamid Hemmati, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer of the US satellite broadband player, ViaSat, which uses geostationary satellites to provide Internet access. "For the first time since the 1960s, when the first tests were done on laser communications, there is a very real application in front of engineers working in the field," highlights Dr. And this isn't surprising given recent analysis from Global Market Insights predicts the FSO market will mushroom by an order of magnitude from some $200 million to $2 billion by 2027. From honing laser beam pointing accuracy and reducing laser system power consumption to ensuring uplink laser safety and efficient constellation connections, researchers and engineers worldwide are racing to deliver results. As the demand for data continues to rise and radio wavebands become congested, laser communications offer the potential to open up a far less busy portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, bridge the digital divide, and deliver blisteringly fast data transmissions.īut a quick glance at the FreeSpace Laser Communications XXXIV conference at SPIE Photonics West reveals that myriad challenges still persist. Without a doubt, the free space optics (FSO) community has its work cut out right now.
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