Optonicus has been named a finalist in the SPIE’s prestigious Prism Awards for its innovative INFA (Intelligent Fiber-Collimator Array) product in the category of Scientific Lasers. The Prism Awards for Photonics Innovation is a leading international competition that honors the best new photonic products on the market. The winners will be announced Wednesday, 11 February 2015 at a gala banquet known as the “Oscars of Photonics”, at Photonics West in San Francisco, California.

Optonicus INFA is the first commercially available fiber-array adaptive laser beam transceiver system that incorporates compact, light-weight “photonics building blocks” that can be used to assemble adaptive laser beam transceiver systems, scalable in both aperture size and transmitted power, with efficient adaptive compensation of turbulence, aero-optics, heat and jitter-induced effects.

INFA provides important advantages including scalability in both the number of fiber-collimators and power transmitted through each fiber-collimator, low weight, compactness, up to 1.0 kW output optical power per fiber, high wall-plug efficiency, extremely fast Adaptive Optics (AO) control of the outgoing beams’ piston phases using fiber-integrated LiNbO3 phase shifters and the Optonicus FPGA-based stochastic parallel gradient descent (SPGD) controller (100X faster than in conventional AO systems with deformable mirrors).