Scottish Company Aims to Commercialize Laser Technology That Eliminates Manual Calibration
A research team at Heriot-Watt University has developed a technology poised to overcome one of modern engineering’s most persistent bottlenecks. Their laser-based process builds precise alignment directly into optical glass components, eliminating the labor-intensive manual calibration that currently accounts for over half of all photonics production costs. This innovation could significantly reduce manufacturing expenses while boosting production efficiency.
FreeForm Photonics, A Heriot-Watt spinout is working to commercialize the technology. The researchers and affiliated company believe the solution delivers a manufacturing pathway that is faster, cheaper, and precise to sub-micron tolerances, a scale far smaller than the width of a human hair. It also removes the complexity that has long made photonics systems prohibitively expensive to scale.
FreeForm Photonics is commercializing a manufacturing process that will significantly reduce costs associated with photonics manufacturing.
The implications stretch across some of the most consequential technologies of the coming decade. Sectors including quantum computing systems, next-generation medical diagnostics and the optical communications infrastructure underpinning the modern internet. These all depend on photonic components that are currently largely assembled by hand.
“By integrating passive alignment features into the glass components themselves, we are fundamentally changing what it takes to manufacture high-performance optics,” said Calum Ross, research fellow in the School of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot-Watt University. “The potential applications range from fiber optic sensing in the harshest industrial environments to enabling the quantum computing systems that the world is racing to build.”
Traditional photonics assembly demands either painstaking manual adjustment or costly active alignment systems, each introducing risk, time and expense at every stage. FreeForm Photonics has removed that dependency entirely, embedding precision into the component from the outset.
FreeForm Photonics has secured funding through Scottish Enterprise's High Growth Spinout Programme to create a high growth and scalable future company and prepare for seed investment. According to the company, the team already has more than 100 industry leaders and prospective customers who have assessed the technology, with strong appetite to adopt it at medium-volume production scale. Trial samples are also being supplied to customers in aerospace, telecommunications, and healthcare.
Source: photonics
