CILAS

CILAS has been France's laser company since 1966, in the specific sense that when the French armed forces need something done with coherent light they have generally ended up here. It employs about 225 people, roughly 60 percent of them engineers, across three sites: Orléans, which is the headquarters, Aubagne near Marseille, and Le Barp in the Bordeaux area next to the CEA facility that houses the Laser MegaJoule. Ownership changed in 2022, when Safran Electronics and Defense and MBDA jointly bought ArianeGroup's 63 percent majority stake through HMS Laser, a holding the two of them own equally.

The laser business divides into three uses. Designation is the oldest. The DHY 307 ground laser target designator has been the reference product for years, guiding NATO and non-NATO laser-guided bombs, missiles and artillery shells for forward air controllers and special forces at ranges out to roughly 20 kilometers. It has since been joined by the QUASAR-LR and QUASAR-XLR designators and the tripod-mounted ASTRA-SR and ASTRA-LR.

Directed energy is the growth area and HELMA-P is why people outside France know the name. It is a two-axis turret combining high-precision optical tracking with a laser emitter, sized to burn down small drones at around a kilometer with no noise, no visible round and no magazine to run dry. Development ran from 2017 with backing from the DGA and the French defence innovation agency, the DGA awarded the L2AD anti-drone combat laser contract in June 2022, and the system was tested at sea aboard the air defence frigate Forbin in 2023 before being deployed to protect the 2024 Paris Olympic Games. Further units have been ordered for the French armed forces. CILAS also led TALOS, the Tactical Advanced Laser Optical System, a 44-month European Defence Agency preparatory action with 15 partners across nine countries, which demonstrated a high-power eye-safer amplifier and coherent beam combining on target.

The third laser strand is space. CILAS supplied laser technology for the ALADIN Doppler wind lidar aboard ESA's Aeolus mission, and builds high power optical amplifiers for space-based laser communication terminals, the equipment that makes optical inter-satellite links work at all.

The optics and coatings side is a separate business and easy to underrate. CILAS runs a large magnetron sputtering chamber able to coat optics up to two meters square, producing dielectric, metallic, protective and black coatings qualified for severe environments across defence, space, astronomy, research and industry. It makes optical components for one micrometer class lasers used in large scientific facilities, including participation in the Laser MegaJoule programme, and mirrors for large telescopes. Its adaptive optics work runs deep. The company pioneered piezo-stack deformable mirror technology and built a pair of deformable mirrors for the Thirty Meter Telescope carrying 3,125 and 4,548 actuators, the largest piezoelectric optical components ever made. Observation and detection products, including systems that spot hostile optics looking back, complete the range. Across all of it CILAS covers the full lifecycle, from research through production to in-service maintenance.