February 2009 Archives

By Joe McEntee, Group Editor

It's time to wrap up our Photonics West show blog for another year. Whether you made it to San Jose or not, we hope you found the reports from the conference and the trade show useful. To have your say on any of our Photonics West stories - or perhaps to highlight the significant developments that we inevitably missed - simply click on the commenting link at the start of each report.

For those of you in a hurry, here's our 60-second take on Photonics West 2009...

• Technology push: as always, there was no shortage of new product launches at Photonics West. It seems that companies big and small are banking on creativity and innovation to navigate tough trading conditions in 2009-10.

• How we got here: there's industry-wide recognition that the slowdown in laser sales is being caused by the global economic recession, not by any inherent weakness in the optics market.

• Spread your bets: optics companies selling primarily into industrial materials processing applications are finding things tough. Vendors with more diversified target markets are talking up the opportunities in steadier sectors like biomedical, research, defence and solar.

• Back to basics: with competition intensifying across the optics supply chain, vendors need to focus on the fundamentals - stuff like bulletproof customer service, fierce operational prioritization (i.e. concentrate on the stable markets, not the declining ones) and sustainable product innovation.

• It's all about leads: the wider economy might be on its knees, but if the BiOS and Photonics West trade shows are any sort of guide then photonics is faring better than many tech sectors. Most exhibitors seemed genuinely pleased with the number of leads they were getting on the booths, but cautioned that "we'll have to see if they turn into real business".

• Extreme customer support: "Here's what we can sell you" no longer cuts it (if it ever did). "What can we do for you?" is the opener that every customer wants to hear these days.

That's all for now. Our Photonics West blog will be back in business next January. See you in San Francisco.

By Susan Curtis, publisher, Optics & Laser Europe and optics.org

It's not every day you get to meet the inventor of the iconic CO₂ industrial laser, so I was delighted to catch up with C Kumar Patel at the Pranalytica booth in the South Hall extension. Patel, who was awarded the US National Medal of Science back in 1996 for his invention of the CO₂ laser, is now chairman and CEO of Pranalytica, a company formed in 2000 to develop and commercialize high-power quantum cascade lasers for applications in spectroscopy and infrared countermeasures.

The latest release from Pranalytica is a 2 W continuous wave QCL that operates at room temperature and emits at 4.6 µm. "It's the highest power QCL currently available on the market," claimed Patel - who demonstrated by using the laser to burn a hole in his business card. The turn-key laser system is intended particularly for countermeasures systems in commercial and military aircraft, where higher powers are crucial to make laser-based systems effective over longer distances.

The newest version of the laser delivers double the output power of the previous incarnation, but maintains the same nearly diffraction-limited beam quality at potentially a lower cost per watt. Several thousands hours of lab testing testifies to the system's long-term reliability, while the package is hermetically sealed for use in adverse environments. As well as infrared countermeasures, Patel said that the 2 W system could also benefit LIDAR and free-space optical communications systems.

By Joe McEntee, Group Editor

With well over 1000 companies exhibiting at the Photonics West trade show, any product round-up is necessarily going to be selective. Here are a few of the product innovations that caught my attention last week (apologies upfront to all those vendors that I've missed). You can also check out previous blog posts for more detailed coverage of new products from BaySpec, Osram, Chiral Photonics and plenty more.

• Cobolt AB, the Swedish manufacturer of low-noise, diode-pumped solid-state (DPSS) lasers, was showcasing the Cobolt Zouk, a CW DPSS laser operating at a fixed wavelength of 355 nm and with an output power of 10 mW. The product is built into a compact and hermetically sealed package (80x60 mm footprint) using the company's proprietary HTCure technology. Cobolt claims that the Zouk provides a power-efficient alternative to the Ar/Kr-ion UV lines and quasi-CW UV lasers in demanding fluorescence applications like flow cytometry and confocal microscopy.

• Alfalight (Madison, WI) was headlining with preliminary details of its surface-emitting DFB laser-diode technology. Advantages are said to include complete immunity to facet damage, on-chip integrated wavelength stabilization and intrinsically high brightness that eliminates the need for expensive, precision optical elements. Manoj Kanskar, vice-president of R&D at Alfalight, described the SE-DFB laser as "a breakthrough technology that will reach beyond the capabilities of bar-based optical sources and benefit fibre lasers, solid state lasers and direct-diode applications."

• BeamGage is the optics industry's "first beam-profiling software to be newly designed, from scratch, using the most advanced tools and technologies", claims Ophir-Spiricon (Logan, UT). The software is based on UltraCal, Ophir-Spiricon's patented baseline correction algorithm, which helped to establish the ISO 11146-3 standard for beam measurement accuracy. According to the specification sheet, BeamGage guarantees that the data baseline (zero-point reference) is accurate to one-eighth of a digital count on a pixel-by-pixel basis.

• Koheras, Denmark, featured its BASIK Module single-frequency DFB fibre-laser system in a new rugged package with passive vibration reduction. Specifications include up to 40 mW output, wavelengths within the 1535-1575 nm band, plus an option for fast piezoelectric modulation. The BASIK Module is designed for applications in oil/gas exploration, perimeter and submarine detection, and wind LIDAR.

• The Chameleon Vision, a one-box laser source designed to "maximize the potential of multiphoton excitation microscopy", was among a raft of new product announcements from Coherent (Santa Clara, CA). A key feature is the high (47,000 fs²) group-velocity-dispersion (GVD) compensation, which means the laser can correct for the large GVD found in microscopes with many highly dispersive elements. The high output power (>2.5 W) means the laser can be optimized for both shallow and deep tissue imaging.

• TOPTICA Photonics, Germany, says that its latest fibre-laser product - the iChrome - enables users to select a wavelength anywhere in the visible range, computer-controlled from 488-640 nm. The highly repetitive laser pulses exhibit 3 nm bandwidth and 3.5 ps pulse duration with an average fibre-coupled output power of more than 1.5 mW. The company has entered into a partnership agreement with Carl Zeiss to develop applications for the iChrome in fast laser scanning microscopy. Other possible applications include measurements of fluorescence lifetimes, pump-probe spectroscopy, excitation spectra characterization and optical component testing.

By Susan Curtis, publisher, Optics & Laser Europe magazine and optics.org

The economic downturn is making it even harder for start-up firms to raise investor cash, which makes it all the more impressive that Mobius Photonics has just closed a new round of financing worth some $20m. "It's been a very up and down process, but we now have enough backing to expand and to take us through our next development phase," said Laura Smoliar, CEO and founder of Mobius Photonics, when I spoke to her on the show floor.

At the heart of Mobius is a team of industry veterans from Quanta Ray and Lightwave Electronics, who are now putting their efforts into the development of high-power fibre-based lasers. The latest commercial release is an air-cooled laser system that delivers an average power of 10 W in the ultraviolet, and in a research paper presented at the conference the company demonstrated power scalability to 30 W at UV wavelengths.

Smoliar claims that the fibre-based system enables much greater flexibility than diode-pumped solid-state lasers in terms of output wavelength, pulse width and pulse timing. The same commercial system can produce 10 W in the UV, 18 W in green, and 30 W in the infrared, and offers independent control of the pulse repetition frequency (>200 kHz) and the pulse width (down to 2 ns) without any effect on the laser output.

The G1+ laser system is based on a pulsed master-oscillator, fiber-power-amplifier (MOFPA) architecture. A source module contains the master oscillator and a pre-amp, while a separate diode-based pump module powers the optical head.

According to Smoliar, the fibre-based system was developed with the microelectronics market in mind, and Mobius has patented a system architecture that enables high-throughput parallel processing for volume applications. In this case, a single source module is used to drive multiple pumps and optical outputs.

Given the current downturn in the semiconductor market, Mobius is keen to develop new applications for its innovative system. Target areas include supercontinuum generation, Ti:sapphire pumping, and medical therapy and manufacturing. Smoliar would be delighted to hear from any optics.org readers who have other potential applications for the system.