Every drone, aircraft, ship and autonomous robot needs to know how it is rotating. Today’s gyroscope market is split in two: fibre-optic gyroscopes (FOG) that are highly accurate but large, expensive and wound from kilometres of fibre, and MEMS gyroscopes that are tiny and cheap but struggle with drift, vibration and temperature.

The physics: the Sagnac effect

Optical gyroscopes rely on the Sagnac effect. Light is split into two beams that travel around a closed path in opposite directions. When the path rotates, one beam travels slightly further than the other before they meet again. That tiny difference shifts their interference pattern, and the shift is proportional to the rotation rate. There are no moving parts: only light.

Why put it on silicon?

• Volume manufacturing: hundreds of devices can be made on a single wafer, like processors, instead of winding each coil by hand.
• Size, weight and power: a chip-scale optical sensor fits platforms where a fibre-optic gyro never could.
• Supply-chain independence: designing the chip in-house removes a dependency on a handful of foreign suppliers of export-controlled sensors.

We are not trying to make a slightly better MEMS gyro. We are bringing the physics of optical gyroscopes onto a chip that can be produced like a processor.Mustafa Kaykısız, CEO & Co-founder, Lorentis Electronics

Where the intelligence lives

A sensor’s real-world performance often depends as much on its correction layer as on its raw physics. At Lorentis we combine the photonic chip with FPGA-based readout and machine-learning-assisted calibration that compensates temperature, vibration and ageing effects.

Our roadmap runs from the gyroscope module to a full IMU and then an inertial navigation system family. See the interactive simulation on our photonic gyroscope page.