MBRYONICS, a global leader in satellite optical communications, announced a landmark technical breakthrough: the development of MBRYONICS STARLIGHT, the world’s first 25-800G Bi-Di Coherent Optical Transceiver. STARLIGHT is a purpose-built from the ground-up for space and provides ultra high speed, free space optical links with dual lasers for separate transmit and receive wavelengths.
The announcement coincides with MBRYONICS hosting the pan-European STARLight Consortium Annual General Meeting (AGM) on June 9th and 10th. The STARLight project brings together a consortium of leading industrial and academic partners to advance silicon photonics (SiPho) and aims to develop application-driven solutions focusing on key industry sectors such as datacenters, AI clusters, telecommunications, and automotive markets. As a member of the STARLight project, which is supported by the EU Chips Joint Undertaking funding of €110M/$127M, MBRYONICS has developed its STARLIGHT Coherent Transceivers to provide unprecedented connectivity in space.
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“Hosting the STARLight consortium is an honor and a testament to MBRYONICS’ growing role in the New Space community,” said John Mackey, CEO of MBRYONICS. “Our STARLIGHT Coherent Transceiver is a vital part of our satellite Optical Communications Platform, providing the global infrastructure needed to power the next generation of direct-to-device, cloud, and AI services.”
As the space economy transitions from standalone satellites to complex, data-heavy mesh networks, the 800G Coherent Transceiver represents the critical infrastructure required to move massive workloads off-planet. Legacy radio-frequency (RF) links impose critical bottlenecks in terms of data rates and transmission speeds, limiting the effectiveness of satellite links. MBRYONICS’ transceivers enable the next generation of space connectivity for:
- Direct To Device Satellite networks: advanced telecommunications infrastructure where low-orbiting satellites act as space-based cell towers, broadcasting cellular signals directly to everyday, unmodified smartphones.
- Orbital Data Centres: Real-time processing of petabytes of data without downlinking to Earth, powered by endless solar energy.
- Edge Cloud Compute: Low-latency, high-capacity “Fiber in the Sky” for AI and global enterprise applications.
- Universal Integration: Seamlessly bridging terrestrial fiber networks with multi-orbit non-terrestrial networks (NTN) to provide ultra-fast datastreams anywhere on Earth directly to mobile devices.
