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"The world optoelectronics market will surpass $1.2 trillion by 2017." That's the staggering prediction made by Steve Anderson, chief editor of Laser Focus World (LFW) in this afternoon's industry perspectives seminar.

Based on LFW's 2008 market review and forecast, the optoelectronics market gained about 7% in 2007 to reach $620 bn, and the predicted annual growth rate is around 7.7%. The main contributor to this growth comes from components, which was worth $350 bn in 2007 and is expected to reach $675 bn in 2017. The biggest drivers for this growth are flat-panel displays, which has a predicted growth compound growth rate of 7.4%.

Looking specifically at lasers, the world market was worth $6.9 bn in 2007 with diode lasers taking a 55% market share. Anderson cites the biggest trend driving growth as miniaturization, followed by the development of new wavelengths, faster pulses and greater beam delivery options.

In terms of laser sales, the three largest sectors are materials processing applications, which in 2007 were worth $1.3 bn, followed by telecoms at $1.7 bn and optical storage at $1.6 bn. "The telecom laser market exceeded the optical storage market for the first time since 2001," said Anderson. "This is largely due to the huge growth of fibre to the home that we have seen recently."

Living in the US, Anderson is all too aware of the current financial uncertainly the country is experiencing. "Device manufacturers are cautious about new investment due to shaky consumer confidence," he said. "This has a knock-on effect to component manufacturers. An indication of this is the news that AMD, a major device manufacturer, announced major lay-offs this year due to the drop in demand for chips."

But it's not all bleak, with the global laser market forecast to grow by 7% in 2008 to reach $7.4 bn. Green photonics, such as photovoltaics - and especially thin-film photovoltaics - also represents an excellent opportunity (see earlier entry for more details on the photovoltaic market). The optical storage market also recovered from a 15% decline in 2006, growing by 7.7% in 2007 to $1.60 bn mainly due to blue diodes used in Playstation 3 games consoles, Blu-ray discs and HD DVD players.

Another area to watch is bio-optics, particularly diagnostics and imaging technique such as optical coherence tomography (OCT). According to Anderson, the medical therapy market is predicted to grow by 10% to reach $614 m.

Could the off-cuts from fish be the next breakthrough optical material? James Grote from the US Air Force Research Lab certainly thinks so, as he presented his research into the optical applications of waste fish at Thursday morning's hot topic seminar.

"Where silicon is today's fundamental building block for inorganic electronics and photonics, biopolymers hold promise to become tomorrow's fundamental building block for organic photonics and electronics," he said.

His approach uses the DNA derived from waste salmon caught in Hokkaido in Japan, and there's plenty of it - 10,000 tons/year to be exact. "DNA from this biowaste is abundant, inexpensive and green," said Grote. "It has the potential to compete with, or maybe someday even replace, fossil-fuel based plastics for applications ranging from eyeglasses to LEDs, transistors and solar cells."

The fish is first prepared in a series of processes, including breaking down the skeleton, removing the protein, decolourization and freeze drying. During this process the DNA maintains its double helix structure and can be doped with various other polymers to enhance certain optical properties.

"With careful doping, the biopolymer demonstrates low optical losses of less than 0.5 dB/cm over a broad wavelength range, electrical conductivities 3-10 orders of magnitude higher than other polymer materials, and they are tunable," said Grote.

So far, Grote and his colleagues have made the first all-DNA electro-optic (EO) modulator, which exhibits lower losses compared with current polymer EO modulators, and operates at significantly lower power. The group has also demonstrated the first red, blue and green bio-organic LEDs and the first bio-organic field effect transistor.

Much work still has to be done before these DNA-based polymers can compete with inorganic optical materials, but Grote is optimistic that his research is taking the first important steps towards creating biopolymer-based solar cells, LEDs and lasers.

At Michelson Diagnostics' booth they believe that more is definitely better - for optical coherence tomography (OCT) imaging anyway.

The EX1301 OCT microscope uses four laser beams focused at different depths to provide double the lateral resolution of competing technologies.

A laser beam with a wavelength of 1300 nm can be brought to a focus of around 20 µm over a depth of focus of 1 mm. However, by using four lasers centred around 1305 nm, the beams can be brought to a lateral focus of better than 10 µm over a depth of focus of 0.25 each, providing a total focal range of 1 mm.

The microscope could provide clearer real time images offering more clinical detail and is designed to see within excised tissue such as skin or complete organs without causing damage.

Ever wanted a pet, but without the hassle of training or cleaning up after it? Well 'Probo' could be for you!

This robotic companion has an artificial optical skin, which can detect touch and respond accordingly. Probo is so clever that it can differentiate between different types of touching such as tickling, poking, slapping and petting and reacts with the appropriate facial expressions and noises.

The designers hope that Probo could be used to comfort hospitalized children who often have long periods in quarantine conditions where a real pet would be inappropriate.

The flexible skin-like foil was created by the Polymer Chemistry and Biomaterials Research Group at the Universiteit Gent, who teamed up with the Robotics and Multibody Mechanics Research Group of the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, both in Belgium. The 'skin' is composed of optical fibre sensors embedded in flexible silicon, which is supple enough to allow the robot to move, but strong enough to protect the fibre from damage (against slapping presumably).

Yasuhiro Koike believes in the optical properties of plastics and, judging by the number of people who came to hear his plenary discussion, he's not alone in his view.

Plastics are conventionally thought to be unsuitable optical materials compared with glass because of their poor quality. However, Koike's research at Keio University in Japan seems to go someway towards challenging this assumption. Koike has developed a highly scattered optical transmission (HSOT) polymer for LCD backlights that exhibit almost twice the brightness of conventional backlights.

The design takes advantage of the scattering effect that occurs when light hits particles with a diameter in the order of micrometres. By adjusting the size of the dopant, Koike found that the direction, angle and intensity of scattering could be controlled. "By injecting a dopant that scattered light at right angles to the surface, we have forced forward scattering only, which has almost doubled the brightness," said Koike.

The HSOT polymer can already be found in a range of laptops including the Sony Vaio, Panasonic Let's Not, Samsung and Dell.

"OLED lighting could be the fastest way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions," said Peter Visser in this morning's industry perspectives seminar on multimedia, displays and lighting.

Visser is the project manager of OLLA - a €21 million European project that aims to develop flexible OLEDs with colour changing options in the next five years. OLLA is made up of 24 partners, including 10 from industry (such as Philips and Osram), and Visser believes that commercial interest in OLEDs for lighting applications will tap into a very valuable market.

"The lighting market is currently worth €58 billion Euros, of which lamps make up 25%, the rest are fixtures, electronics and controls," said Visser. "OLEDs offer a very efficient alternative to lamps, they contain no harmful substances, can produce high quality light -with a colour rendering index (CRI) of over 80 and require an operating voltage of only around 3 V."

Visser believes that OLEDs also offer many potential future options such as flexibility, varying colour and full transparency. The OLLA project hopes to develop a 30x30 cm white tile with a lifetime of 10,000 hours, efficiency of 50 lm/W, brightness of 10,000 cd/m², and a CRI greater than 70 to compete with existing light sources.

To achieve these goals, the group is investigating various materials and processes, and is also looking into lower cost solutions such as fabricating OLEDs without costly indium tin oxide contacts. "So far we have achieved small OLEDs, which are suitable for decorative or signage applications," said Visser. "But in the future we hope to integrate OLEDs into many applications in the home, the office and in vehicles."

Visser painted a very bright future (quite literally) - predicting OLED ceilings in the home that emulate beautiful blue skies during the day and red sunsets at night, OLED wallpaper, OLEDs within glass shower screens, furniture and advertising and in the control panels of cars.

Much hand-waving and gesturing can be seen at Fraunhofer's booth today as its "Free 2C kiosk" invites you to move a projected 3D object with your finger, without touching the screen.

How does it work? Two cameras at eye-level detect the position of your eyes in order to project the correct 3D image from your viewpoint. A row of LEDs at the base of the screen illuminates your hand with infrared light. This light is reflected back down to two infrared cameras, which open and close at the same frequency as the LED pulses. This information is fed into a computer, which determines the exact position of your hand and updates the display accordingly.

Future systems from Fraunhofer will allow you to use two fingers to expand/ reduce the size of an image or rotate it. So watch this space for even more frantic gesturing!

New to this year's event is the industrial perspectives programme, designed to provide market perspective into various application areas. Kicking off the photovoltaics session was Gaeten Rull from the market research firm Yole Developpement.

Rull believes that photovoltaics will become a competitive energy source by 2015, thanks to multi-billion investments by many solar cell manufacturers. "From the 25MW fabs of the past few years, we expect to see gigawatt fabs within the next few years," he said.

Growth has been slow in the photovoltaics market due to the lack of availability of polysilicon but, according to Rull, this is about to change as more money is spent on silicon production. This will boost the manufacture of silicon wafer-based cells, which are typically expensive to make because of the costly raw materials used.

New projects and investments in thin-film manufacturing and III-V cells are also expected to boost the photovoltaic market. "III-V cells are not just used for military and space applications anymore," said Rull. "We are starting to see them used for terrestrial communications applications also."

According to Rull, the key players remain the same, but rival companies are beginning to emerge. "Sharp enjoyed the largest solar cell production capacity in 2007, with 15% share of the market," he said. "Interestingly, the Chinese company, Suntech Power jumped from seventh to third in 2007 with a 6.3% share of the market."

Alongside commercial investments, Rull added that much research and development is being carried out all over the world with the aim of increasing solar cell efficiency.

Could this device be just the answer to Heathrow's lost luggage problems? That's the thought that struck me during this morning's optical and digital image processing conference, which presented a smart camera for postal sorting applications.

The smart camera can acquire and process information such as bar codes on envelopeswithin milliseconds and, according to Julien Dubois from the University de Bourgogne in France, could replace conventional PC-based postal sorting systems.

Developed in joint a joint partnership between the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and the University de Bourgogne, the design combines a CMOS camera, FPGA interface and processor boards.

"Think of the smart camera as an intelligent sensor," said Dubois. "It can process 30 letters per second at speeds of up to 8.0 m/s compared with the old system, which can process only 15 letters per second at speeds of 4.0 m/s."

Not only is the camera faster, but it is also more compact than the original system and requires much less power.

Dubois believes that although processing time is similar to the old system, at 40.88 ms, the use of a co-processor allows for image acquisition and processing tasks to take place in parallel. Use of CMOS sensors allows a region of interest to be selected, which also helps to speed up the process overall.

A total of 1190 people have registered for the event, and I think I must have been travelling in with most of them as the trams were bustling this morning. According to Amy Nelson, SPIE Europe's press relations manager, hundreds of papers from countries all around the world are to be presented in 17 technical conferences, while a total of 151 exhibitors will be on hand to show off their latest products and innovations.

"We are very happy with how the event is going so far," said Nelson. "There is a great energy here, the programme has attracted some big names in the field and technical attendance has increased by 10% from the last event in 2006."

New to this year's event is the Industry Perspectives programme, which is designed to provide a series of executive briefings covering key technologies and sectors. Also on offer this year is a careers workshop designed for students and early career professionals. The workshops will discuss the pitfalls, opportunities, challenges and skills required to succeed in the photonics industry.

The organizers hope that Photonics Europe will be seen as a uniquely pan-European event that enables research and industry to be brought together to share expertise. "We think that this event allows the people who have the ideas to meet with the people who can implement the ideas," said Nelson. "With full attendance at the plenary talks and Industry Perspectives programme, we believe that this is a good indication that people are very interested in this kind of meeting."

You may be as surprised as I was to learn that despite Strasbourg being the seat of several European institutions such as the European Parliament and the Council of Europe, the only direct flights from the UK are from London City Airport.

So after battling across London to reach the airport, it was extremely refreshing to arrive in Strasbourg to find an efficient tram and bus network servicing the entire city. Within 30 minutes I had reached my hotel and was settled in, making final plans for the talks and exhibitor stands that I will be visiting tomorrow.

As I prepare my schedule, I find myself spoilt for choice with a long list of conferences on offer on topics ranging from semiconductor lasers and silicon photonics to metamaterials and photon management. The conferences are supplemented by a series of special events, including a packed industry perspectives programme, the photonics innovation village, and plenary sessions.

If you have any tips on what not to miss, please feel free to use the commenting tool or stop by our booth #312 to let us know.

Welcome to optics.org's exclusive online resource dedicated to the forthcoming Photonics Europe conference and exhibition, which kicks off this week in Strasbourg.

Over the next few days I will endeavour to bring you some of the latest optics and photonics research from an event that promises to bring together different disciplines, technologies and perspectives from across Europe and around the world.

So make sure you remember to check back here for regular postings about the event. For those of you who are attending this year, why not stop by booth #312 to meet the optics.org team. If you need more incentive to search us out, - how about a free laser pen when you sign up for optics.org or our sister magazine, Optics and Laser Europe? Sign up is free and the pen is available for all qualified sign-ups.