News & Insights
Industry news and practical guides covering precision optics, optical communications, fiber connectivity, optical transceivers and emerging imaging products.
Explore industry news, technical guides and product observations. Articles distinguish published developments from verified product availability; specifications, supplier qualification and delivery terms require project-specific confirmation. Internet-sourced reports identify their references.
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A new holiday promotion from Ollie combines a feeding occasion with premium presentation. For pet-accessory buyers, the practical question is how to create an attractive gift product without losing control of materials, packaging and delivery.
Read article →Helm.ai’s latest commercial announcement broadens the discussion of physical AI beyond road vehicles. Hardware buyers still need to turn a software-platform claim into a measurable camera and system specification.
Read article →Leica’s latest application guide connects AI-assisted particle counting to a familiar buying problem: choosing an imaging setup that can resolve the contamination the process actually needs to detect.
Read article →Adtran’s new AI agent suite makes a practical point for fiber-network procurement: automated fault analysis depends on the quality of the equipment data and plant records it can read.
Read article →PetPace has launched its AI health-monitoring collar on Chewy. The device tracks pulse, respiration, temperature, HRV, activity, sleep and posture, showing how US pet wearables are shifting from location tracking toward continuous health data.
Read article →An NC State feather-star-inspired soft robot moves up, down, forward, backward, hovers and rotates using only two pneumatic inputs. Its mechanical-intelligence approach offers a useful sourcing lesson for sealed robots and camera platforms.
Read article →New extended-SWIR detector announcements are pushing imaging from conventional 0.9–1.7 µm coverage toward 2.5 µm. The wider band changes lens materials, coatings, filters, cooling and validation requirements.
Read article →Openreach is deploying Ciena WaveLogic 6 coherent technology with 1.6 Tb/s wavelengths, national 800G services and up to 32 x 400G services in a 2RU platform. Here is what the deployment means for optical-module and fibre-infrastructure sourcing.
Read article →Central Garden & Pet is acquiring 80 per cent of Germany’s Trixie for a reported €400 million, pairing a US manufacturer with a European distributor that sources around 80 per cent of its goods from Asia. Snacks are now about 30 per cent of Trixie turnover, and its best-selling item is a self-cleaning cat litter tray that logs weight and urination.
Read article →RobCo says it has surpassed a $1 billion valuation, doubling it in nine months, and is shifting its centre of gravity to the United States with assembly in Austin and a San Francisco lab. Its autonomous industrial robot Alfie, aimed at high-mix, unstructured and safety-critical factory work, launches commercially in Munich in March 2027.
Read article →Europe’s machine vision industry is expected to grow about 3 per cent in 2026 after three declining years, and the split inside the data is the useful part: component makers — cameras, sensors and optics — grew revenue 4 per cent in 2025 while complete vision systems fell 6 per cent. Component order books are firming a year ahead of system builders.
Read article →Volantis Semiconductor has raised $88 million to connect compute chips to memory with micro-VCSELs and integrated waveguides rather than external lasers and fibre, claiming a simultaneous increase in memory capacity and bandwidth of nearly two orders of magnitude and links under one picojoule per bit. PicoJool’s $27.5 million round targets the same layer.
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