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Welcome to the Semiconductor Lasers & VCSELs channel!

CompoundSemi Online serves the information needs of the compound semiconductor industry and its supply chain with product and market news updates for this rapidly evolving technology. Our "all the news on one page" format, with select channels for specific interests, offer the most efficient news delivery approach in the industry.

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You're darn right they're part of the compounds, but we're also proud to say that the LED segment has "graduated" and can benefit from publications that are more dedicated to those topics. For news on the broad LED industry, outside of general lighting, along with the materials and technology supply chain, visit LIGHTimes Online. For a higher level view of LEDs in general lighting, you can visit Solid State Lighting Design, which covers packaged "lighting quality" LEDs through subsystems, luminaires and application stories.

Excelitas Technologies Introduces 905nm Pulsed Laser Diode
CompoundSemi News Staff

May 13, 2013...Excelitas Technologies’ Surface Mount 905 nm pulsed semiconductor laser is designed specifically for high volume applications such as laser therapy, range finders, safety light curtains and adaptive cruise control. Multi-cavity layers concentrate the emitting source size and create three emitting active areas. When operated at 30A, these areas produce 70W of peak optical output power on average. The laser is mounted on an FR4 substrate, a leadless laminate carrier (LLC), which Excelitas says provides thermal management and power stability. The laser diode is intended for surface mount application and for hybrid integration. The diode encapsulate material is a molded epoxy resin for low cost and high-volume manufacturing.

Osram Coordinating BMBF Project for Infrared Laser Sources
CompoundSemi News Staff

February 22, 2013...As part of the ‘Integrated Microphotonics’ initiative, Osram Opto Semiconductors is coordinating the IMOTHEB project (integrated microoptical and microthermal elements for diode lasers of highbrilliance). The goal is to improve the performance and reduce production costs of laser systems. The project partners are DILAS Diode Laser and the Max Born Institute. The project (FKZ 13N12312), which is supported by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), runs from October 1, 2012 to September 30, 2015.

Modulight Launches 1W RGB LimeLight Laser Modules Claiming Smallest Form Factor
CompoundSemi News Staff

January 28, 2013...Modulight, Inc., of Tampere, Finland and San Jose, California launched the new version of its LimeLight laser systems that are half the volume of previous systems claiming it is the smallest RGB laser solution. The systems produce 1W output power at 635nm, 532nm and 465nm. It measures just 80mm x 80mm by 40mm. The firm says that the systems offer a spread of wavelength from visible 465nm to NIR 1550nm and optical output power from 500mW to 30W.

Modulight says its LimeLight laser system platform is ideal for life science applications as well as display and laser projection. The system has standard interfaces and integrated control and cooling solutions for what the company claims is a very low integration cost. The standard LimeLight systems come with an SMA-905 receptacle fiber output, integrated driver, a cooling controller, and a smart on/off switch. Both CW and pulsed operation can be controlled through an 10-pin connector port by a standard PC user interface or by an analog/digital control signal directly. The platform also supports many safety features needed for medical applications, like pilot beam, fiber interlock, and safety switch.

Mr. Sampsa Kuusiluoma, the New Product Introduction Manager at Modulight explained that lasers have a wide range of package sizes for different wavelengths and power levels.

"We decided to fix that with our LimeLight platform that offers simple unified interfaces for any systems integration despite the varying device technologies and used package form factors," said Kuusiluoma.

BRIDLE Consortium to Develop High Brilliance Diode Lasers For Industrial Applications
CompoundSemi News Staff

January 2, 2013...BRIDLE, a consortium of companies and research institutes from five European countries has joined forces in a common EC funded research project to achieve dramatic improvements in the brilliance of high-power direct diode laser systems. Coordinated by DILAS Diodenlaser GmbH in Germany, the consortium includes researchers from University of Nottingham, United Kingdom, the Fraunhofer Institute for Laser Technology ILT and the Ferdinand Braun Institute FBH, both Germany, the Laboratoire Charles Fabry of the Institutd’Optique at CNRS, France and the industrial partners Modulight of Finland and Bystronic, Switzerland.

BRIDLE reportedly uses a modular, scalable and upward compatible approach,employing beam combination architectures to produce a laser diode that provides more than 2kW output power from a Ø100µm, NA<0.15 optical fibre with a power conversion efficiency >40%. The consortium is targeting a 3x higher brilliance compared to commercially available broad area emitters, with dense and coarse spectral multiplexing schemes pursued for power scaling. Also the consortium is investigating the use of coherent beam combining techniques that phase-couple bars to produce nearly diffraction limited output.

The project seeks to develop a sequence of increasingly brilliant demonstrators, each targeting a specific industrial application. The consortium hopes to address manufacturability and cost down-scaling issues by integrating micro-optical beam shaping and beam combination into the production process. The project, which started September 1st  2012 and runs for three years, receives funding of about €3m from the European Commission’s FP7 Theme 3 “Information and Communication Technologies” program.

Nichia Develops Higher Power Green Laser Diodes
CompoundSemi News Staff

November 23, 2012...Nichia Corporation reports that it has successfully developed a high-power pure green laser diode which has optical output power higher than 1W with 525nm lasing wavelength. Nichia says that the laser will be applied to display applications such as Laser TV. Nichia reportedly optimized the epi-structures based on c-plane GaN substrates to achieve the improved performance.

Nichia says that as a result, the company's new green laser diode achieved 10 times greater optical output power and 1.5 times higher Wall-Pulg-Efficiency*3 compared with the current lower power green laser diodes based on GaN. Notably, the high-power pure green laser diode development completes the fundamental three colors semiconductor laser light source with 1W range output power for each color. Nichia asserts that the three color laser light source will open the application of laser TV as well as laser projectors with the much lower power consumption and the higher color gamut.

Researchers Demonstrate Compound Semiconductor Laser Structure on Silicon
CompoundSemi News Staff

October 15, 2012...Tyndall National Institute (University College Cork), Semprius Inc. and Seagate Technology successfully combined a high power compound semiconductor laser structure with a silicon substrate. The device employs Semprius’ proprietary micro-transfer print technology to print epitaxial layers produced by IQE at its Cardiff manufacturing facility. The optoelectonic integration has the potential to allow HAMR to meet growing demand in the high performance, high capacity, and low cost storage markets. The work was published in the August 2012 edition of Nature Photonics (a href="http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v6/n9/full/nphoton.2012.204.html">NPHOTON.2012.204)

Typical storage capacities for consumer disk drives have increased by 100,000 times from around 20MB to 2TB in just the last 20 years. The increased capacity has been achieved through research and technological innovation. In order to maintain such staggering increases in capacity with the same footprint, the next generation of disk drives need to be capable of storing more than 1Tb of data per square inch. Heat assisted magnetic recording (HAMR), where the heat source is a semiconductor laser device emitting 10mW or more of optical power, makes such high density storage possible.

The researchers demonstrated low-threshold continuous-wave lasing at a wavelength of 824 nm with a total output of greater than 60 mW. According to the researchers, the fabrication strategy opens a route to the low-cost integration of III–V photonic devices and circuits on silicon and other substrates.

UCSB Researchers Demonstrate First Non-polar GaN VCSELs
CompoundSemi News Staff

September 24, 2012...Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) successfully demonstrated a non-polar m-plane (10-10) nitride semiconductor vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) diode. [Casey Holder et al, Appl. Phys. Express, vol5, p092104, 2012]".

According to the researchers, nonpolar group III–nitride materials have the potential to yield the highest performance visible light emitting devices. In these materials, the absence of polarization related electric fields in device structures reportedly facilitates high optical efficiency and allows considerable design flexibility.

High performing LEDs and edge-emitting laser diodes6) have previously been demonstrated using the non-polar GaN platform, but the researchers point out that (vertical cavity surface emitting lasers (VCSELs), which have possible applications in display applications, high-density optical data storage, high-resolution printing, and biosensing, offer several distinct advantages over conventional edge-emitting lasers. These include: lower threshold current, single-longitudinal mode operation, wafer-level testing, circular and low-divergence output beams, and the ability to form densely packed, two-dimensional arrays.

The researchers claim to be the first to produce nonpolar GaN-based VCSELs. The VCSELs were reported with room temperature lasing wavelength of 411.9 nm, a full width at half maximum (FWHM) of 0.25 nm, and a peak output power of 19.5
W under pulsed conditions.

Princeton Optronics Announces 808nm high power VCSEL Illuminator for High Speed Photography
CompoundSemi News Staff

August 27, 2012...Princeton Optronics Inc. announced the availability of 808nm high power illuminator model (PR-HPIL-800-W808). The illuminator comprised of multiple Vertical Cavity Surface Emitting Laser (VCSEL) arrays with power output of 800W. Such illumination is required for high speed photography.

The increased frame rate (or reduction of frame time) means that the number of available photons per pixel per frame is proportionally reduced. Therefore, a very high level of illumination is required to image certain fast events such as speeding bullets or blast fragments through the air. VCSEL arrays are reportedly preferred illumination devices for such applications because of their low speckle and flattop beam profile.

In the (PR-HPIL-800-W808), four VCSEL array chips are mounted in the module and connected in series so that they deliver a power level of 800W from the module. The company says it also produces the power supply which is triggered by the camera for some applications. A diffuser is optionally attached to the VCSEL arrays to increase the beam divergence, if needed.

The company reportedly also offers illumination modules of various power levels starting from several watts to 800Watts for CW, QCW or pulsed illumination. In addition to 808nm, we offer illumination modules at other wavelengths such as 830nm, 976nm, 1064nm and at 680nm (red).

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