At the 2025 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Taara—a recent graduate from Alphabet’s X Moonshot Factory—unveiled its latest silicon photonic chip, marking a major advance in wireless optical communication technology. Designed to transmit high-speed data through the air using software-driven beams of light, the fingernail-sized chip eliminates the need for traditional fiber-optic cables while dramatically reducing the size and complexity of the hardware.
Previously, Taara’s first-generation system, known as Taara Lightbridge, achieved data transmission speeds of up to 20 Gbps over distances as far as 20 kilometers by mechanically steering light beams using mirrors, sensors, and other components. The new chip introduces a fundamentally different approach by replacing many of the moving parts with software-controlled beam steering, tracking, and correction, significantly shrinking the system while simplifying its design. Despite relying on fewer mechanical components, the chip demonstrated the ability to transmit data at speeds of up to 10 Gbps across outdoor distances, reaching 1 kilometer in lab conditions—a milestone Taara believes is the first of its kind at such ranges.
Taara’s story: from moonshot to market
Taara’s innovation originates from its work on Project Loon, where the team developed free-space optical communication (FSOC) links to transmit data between high-altitude balloons. Now operating as an independent company, Taara has since leveraged laser-based FSOC technology to provide high-bandwidth connectivity to remote and underserved regions around the world. With deployments in over a dozen countries and partnerships with telecom operators and ISPs such as T-Mobile and Bharti Airtel, Taara’s technology has since made its mark, demonstrating its potential to enhance internet connectivity even in challenging environments.
What does it mean to “graduate” from X as a moonshot company?
At Alphabet’s X Moonshot Factory, projects like Taara and its predecessor, Project Loon, begin as ambitious explorations into seemingly impossible problems. The “graduation” process signifies that a project has demonstrated enough technical feasibility, identified a viable market or need, and developed a sustainable business model. For Taara, this meant evolving from experimental FSOC links between high-altitude balloons in Loon to becoming an independent company focused on deploying laser-based internet connectivity to various regions globally. This progression generally reflects the ideal trajectory for most moonshot ventures: moving beyond the research phase, learning and adapting quickly through a “fail fast” approach, and ultimately validating its technology through real-world applications and key partnerships within its target market—as demonstrated by Taara’s collaborations with telecom operators and ISPs.
How does Taara’s technology work?
Taara’s first-generation system, Lightbridge, delivers high-bandwidth connectivity by transmitting data through tightly focused beams of invisible near-infrared light between two compact, traffic light-sized terminals that are quick to deploy and dismantle. Each terminal uses a dual-mirror beam steering system: a larger mirror provides coarse alignment to locate the partner terminal, while a smaller mirror makes fine adjustments to maintain precise pointing.
To maintain stable links in challenging environments, predictive algorithms process real-time and historical sensor data to anticipate disturbances like fog, haze, or wind, proactively adjusting the mirrors before misalignment occurs. A planned microwave backup also ensures continued operation during adverse weather. Since its debut in 2017, Taara has deployed hundreds of these optical links around the world.
Building on the Lightbridge system, Taara’s new silicon photonic chip eliminates most mechanical components by integrating key optical functions onto a single silicon substrate using integrated photonics. Instead of moving mirrors, it relies on a solid-state optical phased array (OPA) that steers and corrects beams electronically with high precision.
The chip contains hundreds of tiny light emitters, each controlled by software to adjust the beam of light. This coordination shapes the beam’s wavefront, allowing it to be steered in any direction without physical movement. The result is a compact, energy-efficient, and highly scalable FSOC solution designed for greater adaptability in real-world deployments.
Taara’s patenting activity
From this point forward, we take a closer look at Taara’s patent portfolio in greater detail, examining as well the company’s patenting activity dating back to its origins under X Development.
Focusing on the U.S., Taara has had at least two standout years—2016 and 2019—in terms of innovation and patenting activity, as reflected in the company’s current portfolio. Most of these patents were reassigned from Google and X Development to Taara on March 7, 2025, roughly a week before the company announced its spinout as an independent entity on March 17, 2025.
Taara’s path from prototype to global deployment
The company’s portfolio notably includes a patent family dating back to 2012—about a year after Project Loon began development in 2011 and roughly five years before Taara’s official launch in 2017. These innovations, evidently tied to early R&D efforts by the team members during their time at Project Loon, laid the foundation for what would later become Taara’s first working prototypes of its wireless optical technology.
From desert tests to connecting the world
While Project Loon had conducted its first laser-based FSOC lab tests in 2014, 2016 marked a pivotal moment for the team with the “Real Genius” milestone—a successful FSOC data transmission between two balloons 60 miles apart and 20 miles above the Nevada desert, where the system hit a 1.5-inch target and achieved error-free transmission at speeds comparable to Google Fiber. That same year, Mahesh Krishnaswamy had also left Loon to form the team that would eventually launch Taara in 2017.
By 2019, Taara had begun shifting from experimental validation to real-world deployment, with pilots and partnerships in various regions like Puerto Rico, India, and Kenya. The arrival of Thangali Seshadri as SVP of Operations in 2019 further signaled this transition. The timing and focus of Taara’s patent filings appear to reflect these strategic shifts and phases in the company’s development—moving from foundational R&D in the mid-2010s to more application-driven innovations by the 2020s.
Interestingly, Taara’s portfolio is also populated with innovations from various Loon- or Aalyria-affiliated individuals, such as Baris Erkmen and Todd Belt, as well as those from X’s “Captain of the Moonshots” (CEO) himself, Astro Teller—suggesting at least a shared foundation or cross-pollination of innovation across Alphabet’s related moonshot projects.
Patents by jurisdiction
As of April 2025, Taara has accumulated more than 200 published patents and patent applications across approximately 60 patent families worldwide, following its graduation from Alphabet’s X Moonshot Factory earlier in March of this year. About half of these are from the United States, with the remainder covering Europe, Japan, China, and other regions.
Top Law Firms
Notably, the law firm Botos Churchill IP (BCIP) Law LLP is most frequently listed as the representative on Taara’s U.S. patent filings, including more recent ones. Other firms, such as Lerner David LLP, Honigman LLP, and MBHB, have also contributed as representatives for various innovations across Taara’s U.S. patent portfolio.
The patents behind Taara’s photonic chip
Building on their work with Project Loon and the Lightbridge system, Taara has actively secured patents for its innovations. This section looks at key patents related to the new chip, highlighting major technical advances and the inventors behind them.
Solid-state, fully-integrated optical tracking module
Free-space optical communication (FSOC) uses tightly focused laser beams to quickly send data over long distances. This makes the signal strong but also requires precise alignment between devices, especially in changing environments. Convention beam steering methods such as MEMS mirrors or voice-coil actuators rely on moving parts, which can make systems more complex, costly, and less reliable over time.
U.S. Patent No. 11,888,530 (‘530 patent), titled “Optical tracking module chip for wireless optical communication terminal,” addresses these challenges by introducing a fully integrated optical tracking module built around a solid-state optical phased array (OPA). This compact chip combines the OPA, analog drive circuit, photodetector, and processors in a single package. The system extracts signal data from an incoming beam using the photodetector and adjusts the OPA’s phase shifters via the analog drive to precisely steer the outgoing beam – without any mechanical parts.
This solid-state, chip-scale design improves durability and simplified deployment, allowing fast, adaptive beam control for stable FSOC networks. This also supports advanced network configurations like mesh, ring, and point-to-multipoint, making Taara chip ideal for scalable, cost-effective broadband in hard-to-reach environments.
The ‘530 patent was filed on March 18, 2022, and was granted on January 30, 2024. BCIP Law represented Taara’s team in the patent filing. The listed inventors are Baris Erkmen, Devin Brinkley, Eric “Astro” Teller, Thomas Moore, and Jean-Laurent Plateau.
Compact, software-driven FSOC terminal-on-a-chip
Building on the solid state approach of the ‘530 patent, U.S. Patent No. 11,996,886 (‘886 patent), titled “Integrated on-chip wireless optical communication terminal,” introduces a more streamlined and robust solution through a compact, integrated system architecture.
This design of ‘886 patent combines an optical phased array (OPA) photonic integrated chip with a transceiver chip on a single platform. The OPA enables solid-state beam steering and wavefront correction without moving parts, while the transceiver integrates components like lasers, amplifiers, detectors, and modulators into a single chip. The system also includes software-defined optical modems, which enable advanced modulation and signal processing. A single optical path is also used for both transmission and reception, eliminating boresight errors. The system supports hybrid tracking, with the OPA handling fine adjustments and optional mechanical parts (e.g., steering mirror) managing larger movements for precise, adaptive alignment in varied conditions.
This integrated architecture supports scalable, cost-effective deployments of FSOC networks. By reducing the number of components, it also simplifies manufacturing complexity while still offering high-performance optical communication—potentially making the new Taara chip more capable overall, without the typical tradeoffs in size, cost, or durability.
The ‘886 patent was filed on August 18, 2022, and was granted on May 28, 2024. BCIP Law represented Taara’s team in the patent filing. The listed inventors are Baris Erkmen, Devin Brinkley, Paul Epp, and John Moody.
Proactive and reactive advanced motion compensation system
Precise beam alignment is critical in FSOC systems, especially over long distances with narrow beams. External disturbances like wind or vibrations can quickly disrupt alignment. Traditional reactive-only correction methods often respond too slowly, leading to connection losses, increased power use from repeated beacon beam use and reduced performance, especially in dynamic environments.
U.S. Patent No. 12,034,478 (‘478 patent), titled “Feedforward motion compensation for FSOC terminals,” addresses these limitations by introducing an advanced motion compensation system that combines proactive (feedforward) and reactive (feedback) tracking techniques. The system uses real-time disturbance data to predict alignment errors and past behavior to correct residual inaccuracies. These are merged via gain-scheduling into a control signal that adjusts the terminal’s optical steering mechanism.
This hybrid control strategy enhances responsiveness and precision, enabling Taara‘s FSOC terminals to maintain stable connections even in challenging, fast-changing conditions. By reducing reliance on frequent beacon transmissions, it also lowers power requirements and improves efficiency—making it especially effective for long-range, narrow-beam FSOC deployments.
The ‘478 patent was filed on March 31, 2022, and was granted on July 9, 2024. BCIP Law represented Taara’s team in the patent filing. The listed inventors are Paul Csonka, Baris Erkmen, and Devin Brinkley.
Full-duplex, real-time wavefront-sensing OPA architecture
Focusing on optical phased array (OPA) design, a major challenge in integrated OPA systems is enabling simultaneous transmission and reception while preserving wavefront fidelity and minimizing signal loss. Achieving this dual functionality on a compact, scalable chip is especially difficult without introducing optical crosstalk or unintended coupling, alignment drift, or excessive complexity—issues that are amplified in FSOC environments where precision and reliability are critical.
U.S. Patent No. 12,153,324 (‘324 patent), titled “Optical phased array architecture for wavefront sensing,” addresses these hurdles with an OPA photonic integrated chip architecture designed to support real-time wavefront sensing and full-duplex communication within a single platform. At the heart of the design is a grid of phase-controlled grating emitters connected through an H-tree waveguide network. Light is progressively merged through stages of 2×2 multimode interferometer (MMI) combiners, while strategically placed photodetectors tap into intermediate nodes to measure out-of-phase optical components. This configuration enables the extraction of detailed and lossless wavefront error information without significantly disturbing the main signal path.
These measurements drive a closed-loop system that dynamically tunes phase shifters across the array, maintaining beam coherence and alignment. The design uses silicon and silicon nitride layers to combine high power handling with low-loss performance. By embedding wavefront sensing directly into the optical routing structure and eliminating the need for mechanical steering, the ‘324 patent further illustrates the capabilities of Taara’s compact, scalable, and solid-state chip solution. The OPA design offers significantly reduced system complexity, enhanced robustness, and greater alignment precision required for high-performance FSOC terminals operating in dynamic real-world conditions.
The ‘324 patent was filed on August 29, 2022, and was granted on November 26, 2024. BCIP Law represented Taara’s team in the patent filing. The listed inventors are Devin Brinkley, Baris Erkmen, Joaquin Matres Abril, and Paul Epp.
Scalable, multi-layer phase shifter design for dense OPAs
Traditional OPAs in FSOC systems require one phase shifter per element to steer the beam. However, as array sizes grow, this one-to-one mapping increases chip size, complexity, cost, and control demands. This limits scalability and integration for compact, high-performance systems.
U.S. Patent No. 12,132,523 (‘523 patent), titled “Phase shifter architecture for large-element-count optical phased arrays,” addresses these challenges by introducing a multi-layer phase shifter architecture that reduces the number of required phase shifters while maintaining precise control over beam direction. Instead of assigning a single phase shifter to each array element, the system employs a cascaded configuration of multiple phase shifter layers situated between a seed laser and the optical array.
In this architecture, each branch connecting the laser to an array element includes one phase shifter from each layer, and each phase shifter contributes incrementally to the total phase shift required. This layered approach allows for scalable beam control with drastically fewer phase shifters needed, minimizing the chip area and simplifying overall design and manufacturing.
Beyond space and cost savings, the architecture enhances performance by supporting fine-grained beamforming, correcting wavefront distortions, and enabling both small- and large-angle beam steering. It achieves this through an advanced control scheme that splits desired phase shifts into high-frequency components handled by the phase shifters and low-frequency components handled by biasing mechanisms. Overall, this design offers a more efficient, scalable, and thermally manageable solution for integrating OPAs into Taara’s next-generation optical communication devices.
The ‘523 patent was filed on September 27, 2023, and was granted on October 29, 2024. BCIP Law represented Taara’s team in the patent filing. The listed inventors are Baris Erkmen, Devin Brinkley, Paul Epp, and John Moody.
The future of Taara
In an interview with Fierce Network, Taara’s founder and CEO, Mahesh Krishnaswamy discussed the company’s future after graduating from Alphabet’s X Moonshot Factory. Taara plans to grow into new markets, strengthen its presence in existing ones, and introduce flexible business models such as product sales and bandwidth-as-a-service.
With ongoing innovation in its technology and business strategy, Taara is well positioned to scale low-cost, high-speed wireless internet in remote and underserved areas – pushing its mission to make global connectivity more accessible and inclusive.
