Over 95% of internet data traverses through submarine cables, with annual demand surging by more than 40%. Addressing this demand requires critical expansion of cable bandwidth capacity. The prevailing consensus for meeting this demand is transitioning from single-core to multicore fiber (MCF)-based space division multiplexing (SDM), starting with 2-core MCFs and advancing to 4-core and higher channel count MCFs.
Chiral Photonics is at the forefront of this technological advancement, providing MCF fanouts and related components that facilitate the seamless integration of these innovations into existing networks. Our submarine-qualified fanouts are currently in production, and we also offer a range of complementary components, including attenuators, wavelength division multiplexers, and other MCF amplifier components and assemblies.
Our MCF fanouts and associated products are instrumental in supporting the evolution of submarine cable technology and ensuring its compatibility with current infrastructure.
Fiber optic cables form the ever-increasing majority of the global terrestrial communications network and many niche applications, such as data center interconnects (DCIs), enterprise networks, sensing networks and shipboard communications. Multicore fibers can be used to increase bandwidth density while reducing the amount of fiber needed and the cable diameter and weight. Smaller diameter cables are more flexible and can obviate the need for additional conduits, extensive street excavations and the permitting required for most construction. More flexible cables can be pulled over longer and circuitous distances. Planes, ships, military equipment and systems, the electric grid and cell towers, to name a few, can have stringent weight limitations that benefit from reduced weight fiber optic solutions. Data centers are coping with ever-increasing numbers of fibers that complicate routing and maintenance. Quantum communications, radiofrequency over fiber (RFoF) networks are other niche applications where multicore fiber provides security and signal integrity advantages in addition to the bandwidth density and reduced weight advantages.
Chiral Photonics provides MCF fanouts and other MCF-related components, interconnects and assemblies and related installation services to address these growing needs.
3D shape sensing is used in various industries and applications where precise tracking and mapping of the shape, position, and movement of objects is required.
MCF-based 3D shape sensing provides precise location and deformation measurements, which is relevant to many applications ranging from medical applications, robotics and automation, aerospace and aviation, structural monitoring of bridges or airplanes or wind turbine blades, minimally invasive surgery, navigation and industrial metrology.
Space communication enables the exchange of data through the atmosphere and/or outer space. The communication may be between earth and a satellite or two satellites, for example. Increasingly this communication is migrating from radio frequency to optical, or laser, communications to gain increased bandwidth. Chiral Photonics’ high density fiber arrays, or PROFA components, are being used to make these communication systems possible. PROFAs can be customized to provide high fill factor channels and can be polarization maintaining, linear or even circular, to help meet the challenges of this growing market.
Fiber lasers are increasingly being used as reliable and stable laser sources for applications ranging from telecommunications to biomedical equipment, for diagnostics to ablation, to industrial equipment, for metrology to semiconductor processing to cutting steel. Chiral Photonics’ Pump-Signal Combiners as well as other fiber-based components are enabling fiber lasers from low to high power and across a broad spectrum of operating wavelengths.
