Fiber Optic Company To Release New Products

Space Photonics Inc., the Fayetteville fiber optic research and product development start-up company, has targeted late next year for the release of several new commercial components.

Company president and CEO Chuck Chalfant said that if consumers are as hungry for fiber-driven technology in 2001 as venture capital investors have been this year to invest in it, Space Photonics could become the next technology darling.

Space Photonics, a spinoff of ONI Systems Inc. in San Jose, Calif., and a client of the University of Arkansas’ Genesis Technology Incubator, has to date received four Small Business Innovative Research grants totaling $2 million.

It got its start in February 1999 by developing satellite interface cards that can process heavy data. The company expects to earn $700,000-$800,000 next year for R&D it’s already doing for NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense’s Air Force Research Laboratory.

“The fiber optic market was the flavor-of-the-year for venture capitalists,” Chalfant said. “Gobs and gobs and gobs of money have been put into this area for R&D, and the reason is fiber optics offers the solution to Internet bottlenecks.”

Chalfant, a Booneville native, is banking on the return potential of his company’s network interface cards and fiber optic transceiver components. The products convert electronic signals into optical signals that can pass over fiber lines.

Space Photonics has come up with a 12-channel interface which has a much greater capacity than the industry-standard one-channel version. One practical application for the component is for intraoffice or local area networks with heavy traffic.

Additional products the company is developing are focused at the commercial avionics and space technology markets.

“We want to dive into a highly competitive market in a careful way,” Chalfant said. “We have a moderate-growth business plan, but we do see some incredible opportunities.”