Optics.org

Solinide Photonics, developer of silicon nitride photonic integrated circuits for optical interconnects, has announced the closing of a seed funding round from six financial and strategic investors. The €4.0 million ($4.7 million) capital raised represents a broadening of the investor consortia for the seed stage and will enable Solinide to commercialize its patented technology and prepare for scalable manufacturing.

Syntec Optics, the Rochester-based provider of precision optical components deployed across a range of industry verticals, has posted sales of $8.3 million in the June quarter - up 26 per cent year-on-year to reach an all-time high. That rate of growth was driven primarily by applications in communications, defense, and consumer markets, with the company’s management team confident that the period will come to mark an “inflection point” in financial performance.

Zeiss Spectroscopyhas launched Zeiss SPARC (Spectroscopic Process Analysis & RDF/SRF Control), an “inline solution” for quality control of alternative fuels in the notoriously polluting cement industry. The system, which is based on near infrared spectroscopic analysis of the combustion gases, will be first presented at theGlobal CemFuels Conferencein Geneva on September 23 and 24, 2026.

In recent years, the European Alps have experienced devastating glacier collapses: in September 2023, a section of the Marmolada glacier in the Dolomites (in Italy) collapsed, resulting in the deaths of seven mountaineers. Just over a year and a half later, in May 2025, the Birch Glacier above Blatten (Switzerland) collapsed, “keeping the country and the entire world on tenterhooks,” stated ETH Zurich.

Hesai Technology, the Shanghai-headquartered market leader in automotive lidar, has detailed plans to extend its technological scope dramatically, in a bid to target the emerging market for humanoid robotics.

Researchers at the University of Southampton's Optoelectronics Research Centre (ORC) and The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) have demonstrated a new technique for assessing the length of DNA molecules and fragments. Described in two papers published in ACS Measurement Science Au, the findings open up a potential new way to analyze genetic material for genomic workflows including next-generation sequencing and fragmentomics-based diagnostics.

Fabrinet, the Thailand-based provider of advanced optical packaging and manufacturing services, has posted annual sales of $4.64 billion for the year ending June 26, up 36 per cent on what was already a record-breaking total a year ago. The latest total was reached after the NYSE-listed company beat its sales guidance for the June trading quarter, with revenues of $1.32 billion well ahead of the $1.25 billion-$1.29 billion range indicated in May.

Over the past two decades, photonic-crystal surface-emitting lasers (PCSELs) have shown promise as a type of advanced semiconductor laser useful in defense and aerospace-related applications. Typically, these devices are made with photonic crystal patterns, which repeat across the area of the device.

Buildings today typically rely on separate systems to provide electricity, heating and cooling. A research team at theKarlsruhe Institute of Technology(KIT), Germany, has developed a hybrid energy system that delivers all three simultaneously from the same surface by combining solar energy with the coldness of outer space. At the heart of the system is a transparent cooling layer that radiates heat into outer space as infrared radiation while allowing sunlight to pass through.

Accurately identifying the borders of malignant tissues is one of the critical challenges in cancer therapy, and multiple optical approaches have been applied to the task as alternatives to time-consuming tissue excision and biopsy.