MONTREAL - This year, two companies—Santa Clara, California-based Anello Photonics and Montreal-based One Silicon Chip Photonics (OSCP)—have introduced new gyroscope-on-a-chip navigation systems, allowing for precise heading and distance tracking without satellite signals, Willie D. Jones writes for IEEE Spectrum. Continue reading original article.
The Military & Aerospace Electronics take:
20 February 2025 - Jones says that as GPS remains susceptible to jamming and spoofing, inertial navigation is becoming increasingly essential to ensure reliable positioning. These vulnerabilities have been extensively documented in conflict zones such as Ukraine and the Middle East, where military forces frequently encounter severe GPS disruptions. Signal loss can be disastrous for drones, which depend on GPS for navigation, often resulting in crashes.
Optical gyroscopes have long been explored as an alternative to satellite-based navigation. While larger versions, like ring-laser gyroscopes, have been in use since the 1970s, miniaturizing them posed challenges due to deteriorating signal-to-noise ratios. Unlike other microelectronics that followed Moore’s Law, these gyroscopes remained large, power-hungry, and difficult to scale down.
"Every week there's an article about a commercial flight or defense-related mission getting GPS jammed like thousands of flights to and from Europe affected by suspected Russian jamming. GPS has become a single-point of failure because it's too easily compromised with various jamming & spoofing techniques. ANELLO's proven and commercially available optical gyroscope is the only navigational tool that can take over: precision over long periods of time, the size of a golf ball, low power, low cost, that's immune to shock and vibration. ANELLO will save lives in the air, on the road, and over water," said Tony Fadell Build Collective Principal and Nest Founder in November 2024.
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Jamie Whitney, Senior Editor
Military + Aerospace Electronics
