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Beijing can make more missiles for less with breakthrough for chip-based gyroscopes: paper
- Chip-sized optic gyroscope paves way for mass production of low-cost missiles, say defence industry engineers
- Arms producers must ‘further cut the cost, reduce size and greatly increase shipment volume to meet the military’s urgent demand’, say authors
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Stephen Chenin Beijing
China has developed a low-cost fibre-optic gyroscope that can be mass-produced in an old-fashioned computer chip plant, speeding up the delivery of tactical missiles and other guided weapons to the Chinese military stockpile, according to defence industry engineers.
The technology is available in only two countries – China and the United States – according to the research team led by Mao Yuzheng, a senior engineer with the Xian Flight Automatic Control Research Institute under the Aviation Industry Corporation of China.
China was moving fast but remained about two years behind the US in this “disruptive” chip race, said Mao and his co-authors from the People’s Liberation Army equipment department in a paper published in the Journal of Chinese Inertial Technology on Monday.
The gyroscope enables a missile to automatically correct its turn and pitch motion in flight, even when its GPS is down.
Mechanical gyroscopes have in recent decades been replaced mainly by fibre-optic gyros that are accurate without using moving components.
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