Sovereign inertial navigation, made in Canada

About

Montreal

One Silicon Chip Photonics (OSCP) is a fabless Canadian-based integrated optics sensor company providing inertial navigation sensors for autonomous vehicles.

Leadership: The team behind the technology

Oversight: Board of Directors

Navigation that doesn't depend on the sky.

Almost every autonomous system alive today assumes it can see a satellite. That assumption is getting harder to defend.

Jamming is cheap and routine. Spoofing is mature, and worse, because it hands a vehicle a confident wrong answer rather than no answer at all. And in a great many places the signal was never going to arrive: tunnels, mines, hulls, warehouses, the space under a bridge deck.

When the fix goes, a platform navigates on what it carries. That is inertial sensing, and how long the platform stays useful comes down to how slowly its sensors drift.

We build those sensors. In Canada, with no US-controlled content, so the programmes that use them are not waiting on somebody else’s export approval.

Numbers that matter to your programme.: A deep-tech company with real traction.

  • 2019 Founded in Montréal, Québec
  • 15 Family patents granted across the photonic IMU platform.
  • 40 Issued patents.
  • 3 Continents served through our distributor network.
  • 0 Moving parts in the photonic sensing path.

Our story: From a photonics lab to fielded systems

The performance engineers want from an inertial sensor has existed for decades. It has just been locked inside a package most platforms cannot carry.

Fiber-optic gyroscopes measure rotation with light and do it beautifully. They also want hundreds of metres of precision-wound optical fiber, which makes them large, power-hungry and slow to build. For a ship that is a fair trade. For a drone, a robot or a survey rig it is not a trade at all.

OSCP started from a straightforward question: what if the optical path were built on a chip instead of wound by hand? Same physics, the Sagnac effect, but produced with semiconductor processes rather than skilled assembly. Founder and CEO Kazem Zandi came to it from process engineering at C2MI and work at Defence R&D Canada, and the company has been building toward that answer ever since, now with 15 patents granted across the platform.

Today the MK2 family ships tactical-grade inertial measurement units to customers in defence, aerospace, robotics and heavy industry, alongside a navigation-grade photonic prototype. We are fabless and based in Montreal, and we design ITAR-free from the beginning rather than retrofitting it later, because export jurisdiction is decided by what goes into a product, not by what a datasheet claims afterwards.

Investors and partners: Backed for the long haul

Institutional investors and R&D partners across Canada and Europe