Pilot Photonics

Pilot Photonics Ltd was founded in August 2011. It is a privately held company that is majority owned by the founders and senior management team. The company offers unique optical comb source subsystems that it develops as a platform technology applicable to many markets including communication, spectroscopy, sensing, and metrology. 

Since its foundation, the company has been developing deep IPR around optical comb generation. Through technology development and licensing, it owns or has access to several important patents in this field and based on these delivers robust and cost-effective optical comb sources, which emit highly stable, low linewidth, phase-matched wavelength combs. The company has shipped its bench-top products globally.

Pilot Photonics' core expertise and intellectual property are in the area of optical combs. The company produces bench-top comb source instruments for Research and Development. It produces software-controllable OEM comb source modules for integration into the manufacturer's equipment. Finally, the company produces comb laser chips and packaged lasers for external control. It creates micro-optical combs using photonic integration. This state-of-the-art technology combines multiple optical functions on a single photonic chip and is analogous to the development of microchips in the 1960s which combined multiple electronic functions on a single silicon chip. 

The use of photonic integration drives huge efficiencies in cost, footprint, power consumption and performance and Pilot Photonics has the world’s only photonic integrated comb laser source. In the space market, the technology can be applied to laser communication terminals, optical frequency generation units, optical fibre sensor interrogation, terahertz and mmWave generation, spectroscopy, optical clock generation, atom trapping and many more.

Service domain

• Satellite Technology

Technology domain

• Optoelectronics