It wants to install the system here in the next few years as a demonstration project that could pave the way for more such networks in cities and rural communities throughout New Mexico, and then beyond.
OptiPulse has already built the technology. Now, it’s a matter of deploying it into a ubiquitous array of telecommunications nodes that can beam affordable high-speed internet into any home or business that wants it, said company CEO Mathis Shinnick.
“Albuquerque is the footprint where we want it to happen first,” Shinnick said. “We want this to become a global technology, but with New Mexico as the showcase. As we move forward, we’ll work to keep most of our manufacturing and production here to ship it elsewhere.”
Those are lofty goals for a homegrown startup that only launched in April 2015. But the architect behind the new technology – OptiPulse founder, President and Chief Operating Officer John Joseph – is a longtime optics engineering wiz and previous Sandia National Laboratories scientist who gained broad recognition for building the technology that fueled Trilumina Inc.
Trilumina is another homegrown startup that has generated $10 million in venture capital. It’s now working with global partners to incorporate its optics technology into future automobiles for autonomous sensing capabilities.
At OptiPulse, Joseph has created laser chips that can beam data at 10 gigabytes per second (GBPS). The technology is built on a “vertical cavity surface emitting laser,” or Vixel, platform that allows engineers to virtually grow crystals directly on a semiconductor wafer. The crystals are arranged in ways that produce minuscule cavities with mirrors on the sides.
As electricity flows through the cavities, it’s converted into photons and phonons, meaning the electric current creates light each time it pulses through the cavities.
“That resonates within the cavity and builds in power to push an amazing circuit of energy coming out of just a small spot,” Joseph said.
Those laser pulses can be harnessed to create a high-speed, high-power light source at very low cost that can be manipulated for use in different applications. In Joseph’s OptiPulse architecture, light from multiple chips with hundreds of lasers on each one is used to simultaneously beam wireless data from one transceiver to another.
OptiPulse plans to mount arrays of transceivers, or nodes, throughout cities or communities to beam high-speed Internet service to any end user who wants to hook in.
“It will be nodes talking to nodes that are only a few kilometers apart,” Joseph said. “Each node could hook up 50 houses, for example, and we’d put up a broad grid of nodes.”
That’s very different from the radio frequency technology used today for wireless communications, whereby signals are shot out randomly from towers in all directions over a wide area. Buildings and infrastructure interfere with the signals, lowering the transmitting power and greatly limiting speeds even for today’s state-of-the-art radio frequency for wireless devices like cellphones. And it’s expensive to install and power the towers.
In contrast, the OptiPulse system is based on a “meshed,” or multiple-transceiver, network with low-cost, high-power lasers that beam signals directly from node to node. The array eliminates interference because the system routes signals through the most-efficient path to reach end users, Joseph said.
“Each node will be linked to multiple other nodes, so if one signal goes out, it will still travel through the meshed network,” he said.
In rural areas, the system could potentially provide even faster speeds because fewer transceivers would be needed, allowing the laser chips to shoot beams at optimum speed over long distances.
“Ten GBPS is an old figure for us today,” Shinnick said. “We’re now testing chips we believe will manage 20 GBPS, and we’ll reach 40 before long.”
The company is working at the Team Technologies engineering firm at Sandia Science and Technology Park as a member of the new, city-backed Team Accelerator that’s helping local startups build innovative hardware into viable products.
“Team is helping us with initial circuit board production to get off the ground,” Shinnick said. “It’s giving us the immediate infrastructure we need for prototyping capability.”
The company already has a contract with a corporate investor to build a first 13-kilometer demonstration network in another state. But it’s working with local technology companies and organizations to build a new Broadband Coalition here that would seek National Science Foundation funding for a demonstration project in Albuquerque under a new NSF-sponsored program to support emerging wireless Internet technology in select cities around the country.
The project could provide leapfrog innovation to propel Albuquerque into a GigaCity at less than half of what it would cost to lay fiber optics across the urban landscape, Joseph said. The network would operate at 10 GBPS speeds, but it would offload signals at 1 GBPS speeds for homes and businesses to start. That’s about 100 times faster than today’s typical speeds.
©2017 the Albuquerque Journal (Albuquerque, N.M.) Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
