The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – ANELLO Photonics Booth Interview at CES Show 2023

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

ANELLO Photonics Booth Interview at CES Show 2023 Anellophotonics.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready. Get ready. Strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, my host is Voss here for the Chris Voss Show at DocDom. We're at the Anillo booth at 10742 in North Hall. I'm here with Mario. Mario, how are you doing today?

Good. Nice to meet you, Chris. Pleasure to meet you as well. So give us your title. Tell us what you guys do here. So my name is Mario Paniccia. I'm the co-founder and CEO of Anello Photonics. What we're doing here, what we announced yesterday, is the world's first silicon photonics optical gyro. Wow.

So we call it SciFog, for short, silicon photonics optical gyro. Wow. So we call it SIFOG, for short, Silicon Photonics Optical Gyro. And what this is is essentially it's fiber gyro performance on a chip. Wow. So we're building this with integrated photonics. And so first thing you ask is what a gyro is. So everyone has a gyro. Gyro measures position, rotation. You have one in your phone, right?

When you pick up your phone and you rotate AirPods, it has a gyro in there that senses motion, but it's not very accurate. So for the autonomous market, if you want accuracy, what people really use is fiber gyro technology. That's big, bulky, and expensive, like $50,000, $100,000. This is what's in tactical grade, submarines, air fighters. So if you want to take that to the autonomous market, drones, robots, automobiles, trucking, it's too expensive. So what we've done is we've taken the same performance in a fiber gyro or a fog, fiber optic gyro, and put it all into the small form factor in this box this unit is the laser the electronics the locking amplifier the silicon photonics and the wave guide and the fiber wow so this is the world's smallest there's a lot in there so if you come over here we actually have

one running okay i'll talk about the application sure so this is we had a press release yesterday if you go online on our website or you can this is, we had a press release yesterday. If you go online, our website, or you can look up Anello. We did a press release where our partner, Tower, the CEO of Tower Jazz Semiconductor, who's been our partner from the beginning, we've been creating this waveguide-based technology. So this is a side fog running. So what you actually see here, it's just rotating back and forth. It's a small unit, and you actually see it as it rotates it's not that impressive by itself but i'll show you later in full solutions and data taking it so what you actually see here is this the gyro moving

rotating back and forth but it's all running on a small unit put onto a pcb board that can be surface mounted and more importantly all this can be scaled to high volume. So, if you come over here, I don't know if you can see this on your camera, this is one of our photonic chips. This is a chip that's lit up with red light. You go in there, we've created a planar waveguide on a

chip. So this is a low-wash, we call it silicon nitride, it's a technical term, but we've essentially created fiber waveguides on a chip. That chip right there, it's a technical term, but we've essentially created fiber waveguides on a chip. That chip right there, it's lit up with red light, and the actual system, it's infrared. There's 22 meters, 22 meters on this chip of little tiny light waveguides that guide the light. They're a couple microns wide, hundreds of nanometers thick. And that allows us to, the benefit of integrated photonics,

these are the same processing that's used in semiconductor. Wow. So they're printed in wafers, and you can scale those and now chip, package, and assemble them. So these are the core technologies now taken over the systems. Okay. So this is an example of our evaluation kit. I'm going to go get a valuation kit.

Do you have some wafers? Do you have some wafers you can take? Yeah, you can wait for that. So this is our evaluation kit. So what you have in here, this is we have different outputs. Ethernet, CAN bus, and USB. Inside here we have our fiber

gyro technology. We have dual GPS for GPS signaling. We have a cpu mams accelerometer gyros and we have our own sensor fusion software wow and this is for drive data so you can put this for land vehicles as you're driving there's a high precision optical gyro that's the heading so when you're driving 90 of the performance is in the drive axis okay we now take this and when you see up on the screen here, if you come over here, and you can see on our website, this is actually, let me just hold it up.

This is our wafers. Holy crow. You actually see in there, you see the wave guides? These are fiber wave guides that we developed out of playing a process, and they're all integrated on a chip, right? So it gives you a sense of the ability to manufacture this technology in high volume. That's cool.

Put this back. And so then we take drive there. This is an example of the same thing. We do it, maybe you can zoom in on this. Okay. And you can see, I don't know if you can see, you see the outside is the waveguide. And then in the middle, you see those little rings? Those are our next generation devices.

Wow. So we can even go smaller. That's crazy how small it's getting. Yeah, and actually what's really exciting about those things is we talk about autonomous for trucking, construction, drones. When we go to those smaller dimensions, what it opens up is consumer electronics. Oh, wow. Phones, watches, something in the future. By the ability to shrink this but still use the optical technology,

the real benefit of optical versus MEMS is it's not susceptible to vibration. It's not susceptible to temperature or EMI, electromagnetic interference. So this is a very stable, solid technology that's predominantly only been used for the high-end military that we're going to bring to the mass market. This is awesome, man. So this is used, you know, the military used to have access to this. We have a lot of interest now from VOD customers, and their performance is a little higher,

but we'll actually have a version of this. And it's really about GPS denied. So if you look at areas today, and the military is fighting in places where they're jamming GPS. So all the precision-guided missiles don't work anymore because they depend on GPS. But if you have a high-precision gyro that can be put into a small form factor, it's not dependent on GPS. It's dependent on itself. So you now can operate in GPS-denied environments. What you see here is drive data that you watch. This is our

system, we're driving around in a car, and we're basically comparing our systems to high-end performance systems. And you'll see pretty soon as we start driving that in different cases such as tunnels, downtown San Francisco, parking garages, that you actually see how we quickly outperform competitors. Wow. And you see here on the arrows showing us the light blue is Danilo. And we have different cases, short drive distance. And you see how already because of the GPS denied denied these inferior solutions, they start to drift.

And the blue is pretty accurate. We're actually at sub-1 meter over, in this case, 250 meters. We've gone 20 minutes, 30 minutes. We've gone as long as an hour and a half. Off through the mountains in Blacksburg, Virginia, we had very high accuracy. And this is all based on the fact of bringing a high-performance optical gyro capability into a small form factor that can be used in autonomous vehicles, autonomous drones. Things that were price points before didn't allow that. There you go.

So who's your customers? Who are the people you want to be talking to at CES? So at CES, we have different applications. So let's go over here first. Okay. So this is now commercial. These are our commercial products. So this is now a sealed solution where we have its auto-grade connector.

So it's fully sealed, waterproof, salt spray, hermetically. It has dual GPS antennas. And this can withstand outdoors. So now we talk about customers, if we're dealing with construction, like Caterpillar, John Deere, all the big construction companies, it's a very harsh environment, not just with vibration, but dirt, salt spray, drones, aerial mapping, a lot of, I'll call it defense applications where they fly things back and forth. Robots.

This is an example of a robot for indoor. This is a robot that we just started testing with that goes very slow. We monitor it on EVK. We can put a lighter on it. But if you're doing indoor fire and rescue, any place GPS denied, a lot of applications where people go into buildings, printers, where they're now in concrete buildings that have no access to GPS, but you want accurate positioning.

We now have an ability to give you technology that allows very accurately where you're at without GPS. And so it's basically because of the cost, price points, and the volume capability and size, we can now start taking these things into not just high-end autonomous applications, but anything that wants accuracy, bringing the same kind of accuracy that was only for the high performance, now to the mass market. Wow. So these are all land vehicle applications, things that move, things that drive.

There's one more application. Okay. Things that fly. Ah's one more application. Okay. Things that fly. Ah, things that fly. So now, things that fly, this is three axes. So inside here, we actually put three of these, X, Y, Z. And now you have a full three-axis IMU. This is the world's smallest optical gyro that has three full axes.

Holy crap. This also has anything that flies. Because of the size, weight, area, power benefits, so now you're talking about eVTOLs, electronic flying vehicles, drones that do aerial mapping. The benefit is not just the accuracy, size, and weight. A lot of these electronic vehicles want to go farther distances, and weight matters, performance matters. And so this now, you know, what we call here,

we're basically changing the navigation, the way people think about navigation. We want to bring high precision, high performance, accuracy to the mass market. There you go. So that's what we do with Enelo, and that's what we do with, we call it Enelo Photonics, but Enelo means ring in Italian because we're using lasers in a ring-like configuration. There you go.

Well, thank you very much. Where can people look up this on the interwebs? So if you go to www.enelophotonics.com, and you'll see the recent press release. You'll see the announcement on the SciFog. We have a very high powerful list of investors, strategic investors. We have some personal investors that will be coming out later this year

that we're waiting for the right time. Some of them want to come out publicly on stage. It's a really exciting time. We're getting customer interest. We just came out of stealth mode. So we've been quiet for the last years, and we're now coming out. Now we're only on technology, full solutions, full products, and any interest, we'd love to talk to more customers.

www.nellophotonics.com. There you go. Thank you very much, Mario. We really appreciate it. It was a real pleasure talking to you, Chris. And, guys, be sure to come on down. Check out Anello at booth 10742 at CES Show. This is Mike, our CTO.

Hi, Mike. All right.