Dear readers,

We are delighted to bring you the latest news from Pilot Photonics covering recent months and looking forward. With booths at major shows including Photonics West, OFC and Paris Space Week, a variety of speaking presentation slots, new products and customer sampling announcements, we've been scaling our presence and deepening our impact.

In This Issue...

Closer to Home

Development and news from Dublin

Out and About Worldwide

Our international travels began in January with a trip to San Francisco to attend Photonics West. Again we joined the Photonics Ireland booth with several of our compatriots.

There was great interest in our tunable laser and comb laser PIC solutions from customers, suppliers and investors, and a full meeting calendar. At the end of the week, the team took a trip to DesignCon in Santa Clara - a specialist show for the high speed electronics world. It was Pilot's first time attending this show, which currently has only light representation from the optics community, but it was vibrant with activity, and reinforced our conviction in our Everything over Optical™ vision.

Hot on the heels of Photonics West, February saw us attending Paris Space Week for the first time - and what a successful show it turned out to be! As well as exhibiting as part of the Irish pavilion, we were accepted as one of just 15 companies to pitch at the prestigious Innovation Challenge. Frank Smyth delivered a presentation entitled 'Astro-FG^TM: Agile Optical Frequency Generator.' At the awards ceremony the same evening we were thrilled to be recognised for our innovation in space communications, observation and science when we were announced as the Innovation Challenge winners.

Just a few days later we were in Brussels and at the Tech Tour Photonics Investment and were thrilled to be awarded by a panel of expert judges as one of the 'Best Presenting Companies'.

OFC at the end of March is always one of the most eagerly anticipated shows in the photonics and optical solutions calendar. At this year's show in San Francisco we had some news to share:

• the announcement that our nano-iTLA is ready for customer sampling
• the launch of two 16-channel 200 GHz-spaced O-band laser products

In addition, our 5-strong team had some great interaction with existing customers and potential new partners, with Optica stopping by to interview Pilot's R&D Manager, Gaurav Jain and Senior Photonics Engineer and Product Strategist, Amol Delmade. 

Our announcements were well received by the industry and customers alike. See 'What's New in the News' below for more details, and the Optica video...

Pilot at Photonics West

Pilot Photonics' Co-Founder and CTO Frank Smyth receiving the Paris Space Week Innovation Challenge ward presented by Colonel Noël Farnaud of French Space Command

The winners of the 'Best Presenting Companies' awards at Tech Tour's Photonics Investment event in Brussels in February 2025

CTO Frank Smyth, Sales Director Damian McGillivary, Senior Photonics Engineer and Product Strategist Amol Delmade, and R&D Manager Gaurav Jain at the Pilot Photonics OFC booth

Closer to Home

The end of April saw activity back in our home city of Dublin.

We were honoured to host Ray Rubenstein of Gazettabyte and Lightcounting at our facility in Glasnevin. Having the opportunity to introduce our team and technologies to someone with such deep insights and knowledge of the optical communications industry was a pleasure, and made for a fascinating conversation.

Ray Rubenstein and Pilot's CTO Frank Smyth at DCU Alpha

CTO Frank Smyth presenting at OCP Dublin

With the Open Compute Project (OCP) coming to Dublin, we were thrilled to present 'Unlocking Optical Parallelism: High-Power, Multi-Wavelength Lasers for AI and Cloud Scaling', in which we presented solutions to one of the most pressing datacentre issues: how to scale in order to accommodate the seemingly endless increasing demand for data. 

And, to add the icing to the cake at the end of an already busy and productive week, we were thrilled to welcome a joint delegation from Altera US and Ireland to our DCU Alpha base. The Altera team is interested in the potential of our tunable lasers for free space optical communication transceivers for space satellites.

L-R: Frank Smyth & William Opperman from Pilot Photonics, Conor O'Keeffe, Allen Chan, Sergey Shumarayev and Lisa Raftery from Altera, and Damian McGillivary from Pilot Photonics

What's New in the News?

We're excited to announce that we now have our nano-iTLA in customer testing, and have launched a new 16-channel O-band laser product family. Read more about these developments and what the industry has to say by clicking on the links below:

What's Next?

ESA SCYLIGHT CONFERENCE

Dublin, 3rd-5th June 2025

Pilot's CTO and Co-Founder, Frank Smyth, is an invited speaker at the event

LASER WORLD OF PHOTONICS

Munich, 24th-27th July 2025

Contact Damian McGillivary on sales@pilotphotonics.com in order to book your meeting with our team

ECOC

Copenhagen,

28th Sept-2nd Oct 2025

Visit the team on booth