GPS-Denied Navigation with Integrated Silicon Photonics

As autonomous systems expand across land, air and sea, reliable navigation is increasingly critical in environments where GPS is unavailable, jammed, or spoofed.

This presentation explores how silicon photonics is enabling a new generation of compact, high-performance optical gyroscopes for inertial navigation. Paniccia will discuss the principles behind silicon photonics optical gyroscope technology, its advantages in size, weight, power, and performance, and how it enables precise, resilient navigation in GPS-denied and contested environments.

The session will also highlight real-world applications across commercial and defense autonomy.

About the presenter
Mario Paniccia, Ph.D., is the CEO and chairman of ANELLO Photonics, a venture-capital- backed silicon photonics startup that he co-founded. Prior to ANELLO Photonics, Paniccia spent 22 years at Intel Corp., where he achieved the status of Intel Fellow, chief technology officer, and GM for the Silicon Photonics Solutions Group.

Paniccia started Intel's Silicon Photonics program from its inception and drove the technology to product commercialization. This silicon photonics technology is deployed today in most of the major cloud and data centers around the world. Paniccia is considered one of the industry pioneers and a world expert in the field of silicon photonics.

Paniccia earned a bachelor's degree in physics in 1988 from the State University of New York at Binghamton and a doctorate in state physics from Purdue University in 1994. Paniccia has more than 85 patents issued or pending, and is a Fellow of the IEEE, SPIE and OSA. In February 2021, Paniccia was inducted into the National Academy of Engineers (NAE) for his “contributions and commercialization to the field of silicon photonics”.