INDUSTRY CHIEFS - DOPS - Danish Optical Society

The European magazine for photonics professionals
May 2005 Issue 128
METROLOGY
Vision sensor cuts
inspection times on
the car factory floor
FABRICATION
User-friendly optical
tweezers assemble
3D microstructures
PRODUCT GUIDE
High-power diodes
offer cost-effective
answer for industry
POLITICS
INDUSTRY CHIEFS
BACK UNIFIED
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EDITORIAL
Editor Oliver Graydon
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Issue 128 May 2005
Acquisitions continue in
the world of optics p5
Better beams: multimode
lasers get a new look p17
Optical manipulation gets
user-friendly p26
Keeping cool: a tutorial on
laser-diode basics p31
Cover The European
Parliament building in
Strasbourg, France. p23
NEWS
5 Business Consolidation and acquisition at JDSU•Innoled to
trial OLED production•Giant kaleidoscope opens its doors
9 Editorial Europe’s new challenge
11 Analysis Cambridge Display Technology: braving the market
TECHNOLOGY
15 Applications High-res implant aids poor vision• Glasses-free
3D goes the distance• Holography images live cells in 3D
18 R&D Multimode lasers get brighter•Four-band camera aids
IR study of the environment•Light locks plastics in position
21 Patents Ceramic motors provide optics with silent answer
FEATURES
23 Photonics report advises new direction for EC
Can European photonics remain competitive with firms in Asia
and the US? Yes, but only if a new, unified approach to research
is adopted, says the EPIC. Oliver Graydon reports.
26 Optical manipulation plays trick with particles
Danish scientists have harnessed the power of light beams to
manipulate 3D arrangements of particles at the click of a mouse
button. Rob van den Berg reports.
29 Optical sensor helps to speed up car production
French firm ActiCM’s high-speed, vision-based co-ordinate
measuring machine is grabbing the attention of big names in
the car industry. James Tyrrell finds out why.
31 High-power diode lasers offer efficient answer
High-power diode bars that are highly efficient and boast output
powers of hundreds of watts are now commercially available.
Merrill Apter gives a tutorial on the technology.
SHOW PREVIEW
22 The combined CLEO, QELS and PhAST conference comes to
Baltimore, US, at the end of the month and has an
action-packed programme ready for delegates.
PRODUCTS
37 Synthetic sapphire•MEMS motion analyser•Parabolic mirror
REGULARS
24 Free Literature/Search Engine
49 People
50 Calendar
Contents
For the latest news on optics and photonics don’t forget to visit optics.org

RESTRUCTURING
NEWS
BUSINESS 5 EDITORIAL 9 ANALYSIS 11
Consolidation, acquisition at JDSU
JDS Uniphase (JDSU), a provider of
laser components and subsystems,
has taken a bigger stake in the
solid-state laser market by acquiring
Lightwave Electronics for
$65 m (750 m). By expanding into
the mid- to high-power laser sector,
JDSU hopes to broaden its customer
base and grow its revenue.
“We have seen an acceleration
in the [solid-state laser] market,
driven by a number of factors such
as the demand for smaller-size,
high-power lasers for portable and
handheld devices,” JDSU director
of communications Enzo Signore
told OLE. “There is a big transition
[taking place] as users migrate
from gas-phase lasers to solid-state
lasers, and Lightwave Electronics
has expertise in this area.”
Retaining their branding, Lightwave’s
products will complement
JDSU’s existing range that includes
helium-neon and argon-ion gas
lasers, industrial laser diodes, fibre
Strategic move: JDSU purchases Lightwave and consolidates manufacturing.
lasers and low-power solid-state
lasers. The firm’s sources are used
in a diverse range of applications
in biotechnology, materials processing,
remote sensing and semiconductor
manufacturing.
Lightwave’s 120 employees will
move from its Mountain View site
to the nearby JDSU facility in San
Jose, California. The new business
area will be led by Lightwave CEO
Phillip Meredith and the acquisition
is expected to complete in the
second quarter of this year.
Shortly after the news of the
acquisition, JDSU announced that
it was consolidating its North
American manufacturing operations.
By the end of the year the
company expects to reduce its
number of manufacturing positions
by more than 15% (approximately
850 staff).
The consolidation will involve
transferring production from the
firm’s sites in New Jersey and
Florida to its Shenzhen facility in
China and to the facilities of two
contract manufacturing partners.
JDSU plans to reduce manufacturing
in Santa Rosa, California, as
it phases out some of its display
products. The firm expects to complete
the consolidation process by
the end of the year.
“These initiatives are part of
JDSU’s business strategy to achieve
profitability by reducing cost structure
and improving corporate
agility,” explained JDSU CEO Kevin
Kennedy. “We firmly believe that
our ability to restructure major
operations and rationalize our current
portfolio, while investing in
next-generation products, positions
JDSU for success.”
ACQUISITIONS
OmniVision completes purchase of CDM Optics
OmniVision Technologies, a US
supplier of CMOS image sensors
for mobile phones and Web-cams,
has acquired CDM Optics for
$30 m (723 m). CDM has been
successful in developing wavefront
coding technology that substantially
boosts camera performance
by increasing the depth of field and
correcting optical aberrations.
“Currently, about 80% of Omni-
Vision’s revenue comes from the
camera cell-phone market and so
our first goal is to adapt this technology
to the camera cell-phone
and digital-still camera market,”
OmniVision CFO Peter Leigh told
OLE. “Our objective as a company
is to be the image sensor of choice
in every end-use where an image
sensor is required.” The Californian
firm is keen to target emerging
markets such as automotive, medical,
security and surveillance.
Competitive edge: CDM’s technology greatly expands the depth-of-field of an image.
Images of MEMS and algae without (left) and with (right) wavefront coding.
OmniVision feels that CDM’s
expertise gives it a significant competitive
advantage and so, rather
than negotiating a licensing deal, it
wanted to own the technology
outright. “It means that each side
can confidently share the technology
it has with the other, without
worrying about the possibility of
undesirable disclosures to the outside
world,” said Leigh.
According to Leigh, the acquisition
benefits both firms. “CDM were
in a position where, to make this
technology a reality, they needed
more resources,” he said. “They
decided they liked what OmniVision
brought to the table and it made
sense to join forces with a larger,
more established company.” CDM’s
18 employees will remain at its Colorado,
US, location and the firm will
operate as a wholly-owned subsidiary
of OmniVision.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
5

NEWS
BUSINESS
DISPLAYS
Innoled to trial OLED production
By Manoj Aravindakshan
in Singapore
Singapore-based firm Innoled, a
licensee of Cambridge Display
Technology’s light-emitting polymer
technology, is getting ready to
commence pilot runs of its OLED
production line, according to Peter
Karlsson, Innoled’s managing
director. Pilot production will start
later this month in the Netherlands
at the facilities of the company’s
display equipment provider,
OTB Engineering.
“The pilot production will aim to
improve yield from the processes,
and produce some engineering
samples for our customers,” said
Karlsson. “We want to ensure that
we have sorted out the yield before
we move the production line to
GIANT OPTICS
Giant kaleidoscope
opens its doors
The world’s largest optical kaleidoscope
has been constructed in
Japan as a permanent exhibit at the
2005 World Expo that is currently
taking place near Nagoya.
Officially opened on 25 March,
the so-called “Earth Tower” consists
of a 47 m-high triangular
tower housing a set of mirrored
surfaces and three gigantic revolving
discs. Sunlight entering the
building interacts with the moving
Innoled is about to commence pilot
production of its OLED displays, which
are based on technology licensed from
Cambridge Display Technology.
Singapore.” This should happen by
the end of this year, Karlsson added.
The products will be marketed
under the Nuovio brand-name.
At full capacity, with a tack time
discs and mirrors to produce a constantly
changing 40 m-diameter
Cambridge Display Technology
Library
of approximately 2 min and using
a 14 × 14 inch glass substrate, the
production line should be able to
produce about 1.5 million mobilephone
displays. Innoled is starting
off with 1.7-inch monochrome
displays with a resolution of
128 × 64 pixels, but plans to be
making active-matrix full-colour
displays by 2007.
Karlsson predicts that 2005/6
will see the commercial breakthrough
for OLEDs. “The second
half of last year witnessed lots of
MP3 players coming out with
OLED displays, and many more
applications are beginning to use
OLEDs,” he noted.
“A lot of work is being done to
improve the energy-efficiency and
lifetime of the display, but it will be
A view of a typically beautiful pattern generated by the kaleidoscope (left) and the
distinctive 47 m-high Earth Tower, which houses the optics.
spherical image with stunning
colours and shapes. The image is
some time before we can see OLED
displays for televisions or computers.
The automotive sector will be a
big market in the future, not only
because of the higher brightness
that OLEDs offer, but also due to
their ability to withstand temperature
variations, especially the cold.”
Innoled is a joint venture
between Eastgate Technology and
Inline Display Technologies Europe
BV of the Netherlands, with Eastgate
holding a 70 percent stake.
The fledgling unit received about
$7.5 m (75.6 m) in funding from a
local financial institution in
November last year.
Manoj Aravindakshan is director of
On Target Media, a Singapore-based
provider of technology news.
viewed by observers from inside
the base of the tower.
The exhibit, which is Nagoya
City’s contribution to the Expo, has
already been accredited by Guinness
World Records and has proved
to be a big hit at the event, resulting
in long queues of curious visitors.
Fumiya Fuji, the designer of the
Earth Tower, hopes that it will
create feelings of serenity and
tenderness in observers.
The World Expo takes place in
Aichi, Japan, and runs until 25
September 2005.
6 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

NEWS
BUSINESS
IN BRIEF
LICENSING
US-based Universal Display
Corporation (UDC) has licensed its
organic LED technology to Samsung
SDI of South Korea. The agreement
allows Samsung to introduce UDC’s
phosphorescent materials into its
active-matrix OLED products. These
materials have been shown to be
up to four times more efficient than
traditional fluorescent OLEDs,
enabling lower power-consumption.
FACILITIES
Tinsley Industries has opened a
new 30 000 sq. ft facility in
Richmond, California, to grind and
polish large mirror segments for the
James Webb Space Telescope
(JWST). The facility will be equipped
with nine specially designed
computer-controlled polishing
machines and is expected to
process all 18 of the JWST’s mirror
segments in about 2.5 years.
RESTRUCTURING
Newport is divesting its loss-making
robotic systems operations in
Richmond, California, in order to
concentrate on its core business of
photonics. The business represents
less than 5% of Newport’s net sales
and is expected to lose $2.5–3.5 m
in the first quarter of 2005.
MARKETS
Optoelectronics market to
see strong growth to 2008
The worldwide market for semiconductor
optoelectronic components
is predicted to increase at a
growth rate of 20 percent, from
$9 bn (77 bn) in 2003 to more
than $22.3 bn by 2008, according
to a report just published by Reed
Electronics Research, UK. “Optoelectronics
– a strategic study of
the worldwide semiconductor
optoelectronic component industry
to 2008” is now in its third
edition and deals with lasers, LEDs,
detectors, image sensors, optocouplers
and solar cells.
“The business has changed considerably
[since compiling the last
report] and telecoms is now firmly
seeded in second and maybe third
place after, notably, data-storage
and illumination and status indication,”
analyst Roy Szweda told
OLE. “Thanks to the development
of the gallium nitride LED, there
has been a huge increase in not
just the use of coloured LEDs for
backlighting in handsets, but also
in white LEDs, particularly in
architectural applications.”
The market for LEDs of all types
Money-spinner: the optoelectronics market is forecast to show strong and
sustained growth through to 2008, thanks to booming sales of all types of LEDs.
will continue to see some of the
best growth in the opto market.
The growth rate is forecast at
23 percent from a 2003 market of
$3.5 bn to $9.9 bn by 2008.
Although the optical communications
sector is experiencing a
recovery, the opto market is going
to continue to be dominated by
applications outside the fibre sector,
believes Szweda. Sales of new
devices such as the violet laser,
which will be used in next-generation
DVD recorders, are likely to do
well, but not until the arrival of
high-definition television.
“The device hasn’t yet got a grip
on the data-storage market,” said
Szweda. “The longer-wavelength
red DVD doesn’t seem to want to lie
down and stay still and we are continually
seeing more and more
capacity in the standard disk.”
The report is available from Reed
at a price of 71878 (book only) or
72088 (book and CD-ROM).
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
7

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NEWS
EDITORIAL
Ability
Europe’s new challenge
“European
photonics
needs to
adopt a
unified
approach.”
Oliver Graydon
How the European photonics industry and its
research can remain competitive with the US
and Asia is an important question. You need
only look at the situation in China to realize
the scale of the issue.
While the region has historically been
viewed as a place with low manufacturing
costs and little technology of its own, this
situation will not persist indefinitely. Many
foreign firms, including European ones, are
currently benefiting from China’s abundant
pool of cheap labour, but it is clear that the
country’s own domestic firms and research
centres are becoming more competitive.
Several European associations are so
concerned about the situation that they have
put pen to paper and prepared a report for the
European Commission (EC) advising it on how
to strengthen Europe’s position (see p23).
The report “Photonics for the 21st century
– a consolidated European photonics research
initiative” was compiled over a 12-month
period by the European Photonics Industry
Consortium (EPIC) and the Association of
German Engineers (VDI). More than 60 big
names in the optics sector, including the
CEOs/CTOs of Aixtron, Carl Zeiss, Linos,
Bookham and Rofin Sinar Laser, and the
directors of several prestigious research
institutes have given it their backing.
EPIC and VDI’s report suggests that
European photonics needs to adopt a unified
approach to research in order to achieve the
scale and capabilities required to remain
competitive with the US and Asia. One of the
key problems they highlight is the fragmented
nature of European photonics – research being
spread across countries and a diverse range of
applications. A further complication is that the
EU industrial base is mainly composed of SMEs,
which have limited resources.
The solution the authors propose is the
creation of a unifying platform for photonics
research that will help to improve strategic
links between relevant parties. The proposal
has now been put to the EC, and EPIC says it
is waiting for a response to see if it will be
adopted. It’s too early to be sure of the
chances of success, but OLE will keep you
updated as news becomes available. Until
then, perhaps its best to keep your fingers
crossed and hope that European photonics
gets the investment it truly deserves.
Oliver Graydon, editor
E-mail: oliver.graydon@iop.org
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OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
9

NEWS
ANALYSIS
DISPLAYS
OLED firm braves stock market
Can a high-tech company create a profitable business by licensing technology and reaping the
royalties? Robert Thomas investigates one such company having mixed results with this approach.
CDT
CDT has dramatically improved the brightness and lifetime of LEP materials over the past few years, but investors are not rushing to buy shares in the firm.
Cambridge Display Technology
(CDT), based in Cambridge, UK, is
a pioneer and leading source of
light-emitting polymer (LEP) technology.
CDT became a public company
in December 2004 and its
stock now trades on the NASDAQ
National Market under the ticker
symbol “OLED” (organic lightemitting
diodes).
CDT’s LEPs are an essential
component of polymer OLED displays
– a next-generation display
technology which, it is hoped, will
challenge the dominance of LCDs.
However, investor response to
CDT’s initial public offering (IPO)
has been distinctly lukewarm.
Share price has fallen from a
high of around $12 (79) on the
day of the IPO, to a low of around
$6 in early February. The stock
recovered steadily in March – to
the $8–9 range – but has since
dropped to around $6 as OLE goes
to press in mid-April.
This lacklustre stock performance
seems to reflect investor discomfort
with CDT’s business model,
Licensees of CDT’s LEP technology
Type of licence
Display devices
Materials
Semiconductor driver
circuits
possible concerns over its financial
performance to date and misgivings
about the prospects for its technology.
Unlike most firms, CDT does
not actually manufacture products;
it generates revenues by licensing
patented LEP technology.
The company sold its first
licence to Philips in 1996 and, by
the end of 2004, had sold a total of
Company
Dai Nippon Printing
Delta Optoelectronics
DuPont Displays
Innoled
MicroEmissive Displays
OSRAM Opto Semiconductors
Royal Philips Electronics
Covion Organic Semiconductors
Dow Chemical
H C Starck
Sumitomo Chemical
Plastic Logic
STMicroelectronics
14 licences to several leading displays
producers (see table, above).
In 2003, 10 licences accounted for
74% of the firm’s revenue, but last
year, just five licences accounted
for 66% of revenues.
CDT currently has 179 patents
that have either been granted or
are in the application process. Last
year, it filed 34 new applications
and was issued a total of 45 new
patents. However, the revenue
stream from licensing fees (typically
a large one-off fee that the
licensee pays up front) and royalties
(a smaller ongoing fee) can be
irregular and volatile.
During 2001, CDT signed three
licences and achieved record revenues
of $22.4 m. But, in 2002, the
company signed just one licensing
agreement and, consequently, revenue
dropped to $7.1 m.
Since then, CDT’s annual revenues
appear to be climbing again
($10.7 m in 2003 and $13.3 m in
2004), but its operating losses show
no sign of decreasing ($31.2 m in
2003 and $34.5 m in 2004). The
result is that the firm is still a long
way from reaching breakeven (with
net losses of $22.8 m in 2003 and
$34.8 m in 2004).
The company’s annual report
for 2004, filed with the US Securities
and Exchange Commission
(SEC), summarizes the situation
bluntly: “We have a history of
losses, do not expect to be
▲
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
11

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NEWS
ANALYSIS
Improvements in LEP lifetime (h)
End 2000 End 2002 October 2004
Red >40 000 >40 000 >210 000
Green >10 000 >25 000 >260 000
Blue >1900 >11 000 >80 000
Yellow >5000 >30 000 >290 000
Orange >10 000 >10 000 >320 000
Lifetime is measured as the time to half-brightness from an initial brightness,
then extrapolated to give predicted levels at 100 cd/m 2 .
profitable in the foreseeable future
and may never be.”
One of the problems facing CDT
is that its polymer OLED technology
competes with tried-andtested
LCDs, which are firmly
entrenched in the market, and
rival emerging technologies such
as Eastman Kodak’s smallmolecule
OLED technology. Business
analysts have expressed
scepticism regarding the ability of
polymer OLED technology to make
headway against this competition.
CDT’s stock may also be a victim
of bad timing. Many analysts categorized
CDT as a nanotechnology
player and drew parallels with
Nanosys – the Californian start-up
that attracted intense and unflattering
media attention when it
cancelled its IPO in August 2004,
a few days after CDT announced
its plans to go public.
At present, investors seem to
have little enthusiasm for nanotechnology
stocks: the Merrill
Lynch Nanotech Index and the
Punk Ziegel Nanotechnology Index
both declined in 2004 and neither
has improved in 2005.
CDT’s 2004 annual report
describes its investment risks in
some detail and gives an overview
of the company’s financial performance
to date. Much of the information
is enough to make potential
investors pause for thought, but
also provides some grounds for
optimism about CDT.
Commercial products
Several commercial products containing
small monochrome displays
based on CDT’s licensed OLED
technology have already entered
the market, including a mobile
phone and an electric shaver by
Philips, plus an MP3 player with a
Delta Optoelectronics display.
What’s more, CDT’s progress in
significantly extending the lifetime
of green, red, blue, orange and yellow
LEPs could also mean that fullcolour
commercial displays may
not be far behind (see table, left).
A number of CDT’s licensees
have already demonstrated larger,
full-colour displays using polymer-
OLED technology. Recent demonstrations
include 40 and 12.5 inch
displays by Seiko Epson and a
13 inch display by Philips.
If polymer OLED technology is
successful, CDT and its shareholders
will be the lucky beneficiaries.
At present, however, investors seem
to be more wary of the risks associated
with CDT’s stock than excited
about the potential rewards. ■
Robert Thomas is principal at SRI
Consulting Business Intelligence, a
business and technology research
consultancy spin-off
from the former
Stanford Research
Institute. See www.
sric-bi.com or e-mail
rthomas@sric-bi.com.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
13

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TECHNOLOGY
APPLICATIONS 15 R&D 17 PATENTS 21
VISION
Hi-res implant aids poor vision
By Oliver Graydon
An artificial vision system with an
imaging performance allegedly
good enough to recognize faces,
read large fonts and watch TV has
been designed by a team of scientists
at Stanford University, US.
The system, described in a recent
issue of the Journal of Neural Engineering,
features a wallet-sized computer,
a tiny video camera mounted
on a pair of goggles and an infraredsensitive
detector chip implanted in
the retina. Tests are currently ongoing
in rats, and the retinal chips are
soon to be implanted in pigs. However,
human trials are said to be at
least three years away.
The hope is that the system may
one day be used improve the vision
of people who suffer from retinal
degeneration: the death of the
eye’s photoreceptor cells. Around
700 000 people each year are
diagnosed with age-related macular
degeneration, which results in
impaired vision and, in some cases,
complete blindness.
DISPLAYS
Glasses-free 3D
goes the distance
A 3D display that does not require
special viewing spectacles could
benefit television, computer gaming
and even air-traffic control, say
its Japanese inventors. Based on an
array of small lenses, the device
generates a 3D image, which has a
perceived depth of several metres,
for viewing with the naked eye
(Optics Letters 30 613).
The display uses so-called “integral
photography” to generate its
3D images. A computer divides
the image into pixels that are
either printed on photographic
film or shown on a flat-screen display.
When passed through an
array of lenses, the result is a 3D
image with a depth of 5.7 m or
more in front of the display, and
3.5 m or more behind it.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
Stanford University
University of Tokyo, Japan
Eyeing up the situation: Daniel Palanker and his team from Stanford University.
In the past, difficulties in achieving
the necessary proximity of a few
micrometres between cells and
electrodes severely limited the resolution
of chip implants, resulting in
poor vision. But the Stanford team’s
chip enables users to perceive a 10°
visual field at a good resolution.
The system’s camera captures
an image of a scene, which is
“The integral photography technique
has none of the inherent eyestraining
problems associated with
the continuous viewing of binocular
stereoscopic displays,” University
of Tokyo scientist Hongen Liao
told OLE. “It is an ideal way to display
autostereoscopic images.”
Until now, the success of the
passed to the computer for processing.
An LCD illuminated with an
infrared LED then projects an
infrared image of the processed
data through the eye onto a retinal
chip, which stimulates nerve cells.
The 3 mm 2 chip consists of a dense
array of imaging pixels – infrared
photodiodes connected to cellstimulating
electrodes.
Floating image: the letter ‘A’ appears in mid-air approximately 1 m from the screen.
technique has been limited by the
accuracy of the lens array, which
is composed of glass lenslets of
6 mm in diameter arranged in a
35 × 35 hexagonal layout. But, as
Liao explains, even a small error
in the lens’s arrangement can
cause image overlap and blurring,
which limits the precision and
The scientists say that the chip
offers a resolution of 2500 pixels
per millimetre, corresponding to a
visual acuity of 20/80 – sufficient
for reading a book or using a computer.
The chip achieves this performance
by letting cells grow around
the electrodes, which either protrude
from the chip like miniature
pillars or are recessed into pores.
“We actually invite cells to come
to the electrode site, and they do it
happily and very quickly,” said
Stanford’s Daniel Palanker. Within
three days, cells migrate to fill the
spaces between the pillars and
pores of the subretinal implant.
Although other research teams
in Germany, the US and Japan are
also working on the topic, the Stanford
approach uses a projection and
tracking system to follow the rapid
small movements the eye makes
when viewing a scene. “In reality,
when you think that you are staring
at a certain point, your eyes are
not steady,” said Palanker. “You are
microscanning it all the time.”
depth of the 3D image.
“Most of the autostereoscopic
displays only have an image depth
of several centimetres,” said Liao.
“To the best of our knowledge,
there have been no reports about
producing an image with a depth
of several metres.”
Liao and his colleagues have
found a way of preparing images
so that they can be viewed longdistance.
Firstly, a computer pixelates
the image to match the 3D
display’s lens array and projects
this image onto a screen.
Next, the researchers use the
lens array to capture the view on
photographic film, creating a reference
image that self-compensates
for any lens distortion or
misplacement. “Our method
enables a display device to present
deviation-free, distortion-free 3D
images,” commented Liao. “We
are now developing an animated
integral videography device.”
15

TECHNOLOGY
APPLICATIONS
MICROSCOPY
Holography images live cells in 3D
Swiss scientists have used a digital
holographic microscope (DHM) to
capture 3D phase images of transparent
living cells. The team put its
system to the test by imaging a living
mouse neuron with an axial
accuracy in the 160–320 nm
range (Optics Letters 30 468).
The researchers from the University
of Lausanne and Ecole
Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
(EPFL) have patented their
technique and formed a company,
Lyncée Tec, to market and manufacture
DHM imaging systems.
The Swiss group’s device is
based around a Mach-Zehnder
interferometer, with a 10 mW
helium–neon laser (633 nm) providing
the coherent light source.
The big benefit of the technique is
that it is able to focus on different
object planes without using any
optomechanical movement.
“Digital processing replaces the
ILLUMINATION
High-brightness
LEDs challenge
car-lamp systems
Lumileds, the Californian developer
of high-brightness LEDs,
claims to have developed a range of
record-breaking devices that provide
three times the lumen output
of its best previous products.
The new red, red-orange and
amber Luxeon III LEDs emit 140,
190 and 110 lm respectively and
offer a lifetime (50% drop in
lumen output) of 20 000 h when
Lyncée Tec
driven at 1400 mA.
“This is a huge milestone for the
automotive industry because, at
these levels of performance, it
enables manufacturers to meet the
standards for rear-combination
lamps [an optical unit featuring
tail, brake and indicator light] with
a single LED,” explained Steve Landau
from Lumileds.
“And because you move to a single
LED solution, you start to have
cost parity with a lamp system,” he
continued. “That means you can
implement the technology on a
broader range of vehicles.”
Aside from the automotive
Lumileds University of Lausanne and EPFL
The Swiss firm Lyncée Tec has been founded to commercialize and manufacture the
DHM (left). A 3D DHM image of a living mouse cortical neuron in culture (right).
need for complex optical adjustment
procedures and allows [us] to
correct lens aberrations introduced
by the microscope objective,”
research scientist Pierre
Marquet told OLE. “[It can also]
simulate the effect of optical components
such as lenses and filters
on the reconstructed wavefront.”
Most biological samples, in particular
living cells, are transparent
and provide little contrast
against their background. Fortunately
for biologists, these samples
have the capacity to alter the
phase of a lightwave, and it is this
property that the Swiss team
exploits in its DHM set-up.
Marquet feels that their technique
is considerably simpler to
implement than conventional
interference microscopy. “Classical
Brighter than ever: Lumileds’ Luxeon III
range of LEDs looks set to make an
appearance in car-lamp systems soon.
industry, other potential applications
are in the aviation,
machine-vision and architectural
lighting sectors, where the new
LEDs can be used with Lumileds’
interferometric techniques are
based on phase-measuring procedures
that require multiple interferogram
acquisitions and
phase-modulation devices,” he
commented. “These technical constraints
explain why very few
attempts to use interferometric
phase-measurement techniques
have been reported in biology for
real-time imaging of living cells.”
Marquet points out that, until
recently, processing power has been
the major barrier facing digital
holography as a real-time optical
technique. Here, the researchers
use a PC with a 3 GHz processor to
reconstruct and transform their
holographic data into 3D at a rate of
around 5–7 images per second.
“The main challenge in getting
our system to work has been the
minimization of coherent noise
resulting from the light sources,”
Marquet revealed.
existing range of green, blue and
white Luxeon IIIs.
According to Landau, the boost
in lumen output has been enabled
by the use of a larger LED chip
(about 1 mm 2 ) that can be driven
at a higher current, thanks to
improvements in heat management
and device design.
Can the technology be pushed
further? Landau certainly believes
so. “We will continue to make
brighter and brighter products in
terms of both lumens per package
and lumens per watt,” he said. “I
really don’t think we know what
those upper limits are yet.”
your European destination for optics and electronics
www.ELCAN.com/europe
16 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

TECHNOLOGY
R&D
BEAM QUALITY
Multimode lasers get brighter
Researchers in Israel have demonstrated
a way to dramatically
improve the beam quality of a
multimode laser. In tests, the technique
increased the brightness of a
multimode Nd:YAG laser by a factor
of 10 (Optics Express 13 2722).
The leap in performance is
achieved by splitting the multimode
beam within the laser cavity
into an array of smaller,
higher-quality beams, which are
then coherently combined before
leaving the laser.
“Our technique should be useful
whenever there is a need for high
output powers combined with good
beam quality and compact dimensions,”
said Amiel Ishaaya from the
Weizmann Institute of Science in
Rehovot. “Many potential applications
exist in industry, medicine,
the military and scientific fields.”
In initial tests, the Israeli team
split the multimode beam of a
torch-pumped Nd:YAG laser into
four Gaussian beams by inserting a
Weizmann Institute
rear
mirror
2 × 2
aperture
array
laser
rod
mask containing four small circular
apertures (1.4 mm in diameter,
spaced 2.4 mm apart) into the
laser cavity.
Just before the output coupler,
these beams were brought together
interferometric
combiners
output
coupler
The near-field beam profile of the Nd:YAG laser with (top left) and without (top right)
beam-splitting and combining. The principle of operation of the scheme (bottom).
by the use of two interferometric
beam combiners, which effectively
fold the separate beams on top of
each other. The first combiner performs
horizontal folding, while the
second performs vertical folding.
In each case, the phase is carefully
preserved so that the beams add
coherently. At low pump powers, the
combining efficiency was measured
to be as high as 90%, but dropped to
80% at higher pump powers.
Operating the laser with a single
large-square aperture and no beam
combiners resulted in a multimode
beam with M 2 values in the x and y
axes of 6.3 and 6.0 respectively. In
contrast, the four-beam combined
design produced a high-quality,
almost circular beam with M 2 values
of 1.23 and 1.31, resulting in a
brightness enhancement of 10.5.
The team is now experimenting
with splitting the multimode beam
into a larger array of sub-beams
and applying the technique to different
kinds of lasers. “We certainly
believe that our technique
can be scaled up from four subbeams,”
said Ishaaya. “Indeed, we
are currently experimenting with
nine and even 16 beams, already
with very promising results.”
IMAGING
Four-band camera
aids infrared study
of the environment
A collaboration between NASA’s Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and
the semiconductor firm IQE claims
to have produced the world’s first
four-band infrared (IR) camera.
Based on quantum-well IR
photodetector (QWIP) technology,
the camera is suited to applications
including weather prediction and
the remote sensing of pollution. It
has already been used as part of an
international project investigating
the environmental impact of vegetation
burning in Africa.
The camera’s four QWIP channels
enable the detection of radiation
at wavelengths of 3–5, 8–10,
10–12 and 13.5–15.5 µm, and
combine to give a pixel resolution
of 640 × 512. “This technology
will revolutionize the way we
develop new remote sensing
instruments,” said JPL senior scientist
Sarath Gunapala.
“One such example is the detection
of smog. Smog contains a
range of chemicals which only
appear in certain IR ranges,” he
continued. “The multiband capacity
of the camera array will allow
researchers a full spectral view to
identify them.” Other technologies
such as microbolometer- and
HgCdTe-based cameras are limited
in terms of their spatial resolution,
and HgCdTe cannot detect
beyond 12 µm.
The QWIP camera contains
GaAs-based material that was
grown at IQE’s US facility, located
in Bethlehem, PA. IR light excites
carriers within the wells, which
are then accelerated by an electric
field to generate a photocurrent.
The detector is also likely to be
used to form the basis of a hyperspectral
IR camera, which may
comprise more than 64 wavelength
bands. The project is a joint
endeavour between JPL, IQE and
the US Army Research Laboratory,
and will contain quantum-well
structures fabricated on 6 inch
GaAs substrates.
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TECHNOLOGY
R&D
MATERIALS
Light locks plastics in position
GKSS
Ultraviolet effects: a 8 × 0.4 × 0.05 cm strip of the new polymer in its original state
(top), a light-activated spiral (middle) and restored to its initial shape (bottom).
Polymers that can be locked into a
variety of shapes by illuminating
them with ultraviolet (UV) light
have been fabricated by a US/German
team (Nature 434 879).
The shape-memory polymers
can be fixed into tubes, arches and
spirals, and could have a wide
range of uses in medicine. Potential
applications include light-activated
stents for inflating blood vessels or
staples for sealing wounds.
“Now, instead of using heat, we
can induce the shape-memory
effect in polymers with light,”
explained co-author Andreas Lendlein,
from the GKSS Research Centre
in Tetlow, Germany. “We are
currently developing medical and
industrial applications using their
photosensitivity.”
According to Lendlein and his
colleagues at RWTH Aachen and
Massachusetts Institute of Technology,
the new shapes are stable
for long periods of time, even
when heated up to 50 °C. They
also return to their original shape
at ambient temperatures, when
exposed to UV light of a shorter
wavelength.
Central to the polymer’s fascinating
properties are photosensitive
groups that are grafted onto a polymer
network. On illumination with
UV light, the photosensitive groups
crosslink and bind to one another,
causing the material to hold its new
shape. Subsequent irradiation at a
shorter UV wavelength cuts the
crosslinks and the material returns
to its original shape.
To date, the team has stretched a
polymer film by 20% and then
locked it in its new state by irradiating
both sides evenly with
260 nm light for 60 min. Illuminating
it with light below 260 nm
for the same period of time caused
it to return to its original length.
What’s more, the researchers
have created 3D shapes by irradiating
just one side of a stretched
polymer strip. When the external
tension is released, the illuminated
side wants to keep its new shape,
while the dark side wants to return
to its original shape. This imbalance
of the forces causes the strip
to deform into an arch or a spiral.
Irradiation with short-wavelength
UV light reverses the effect.
S ENSORS
Amnon Yariv’s group at the
California Institute of Technology
has made an optical fibre-based
refractive index sensor that boasts a
sensitivity of 1.4 × 10 –5 . The socalled
Fibre Fabry-Perot
Interferometer sensor consists of
two fibre Bragg gratings (FBGs) that
are separated by an etched section
of fibre. “These highly flexible
sensors add the function of
refractive-index sensing to the
established repertoire of FBG
sensing techniques and can be
applied to many fields including
biomechanical sensing and
environmental monitoring,” report
the authors in their paper (Applied
Physics Letters 86 151122).
D EFENCE
An optical sensor that can detect
trace vapours of the explosives TNT
and DNT has been made by a team
at Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, US. The sensor operates
by monitoring the lasing action of a
semiconductor organic polymer. The
explosive gases cause the lasing to
JOURNAL WATCH
cease by introducing non-radiative
pathways that compete with the
stimulated emission. According to
the team, the technology “promises
to deliver sensors that can detect
explosives with unparalleled
sensitivity” (Nature 434 876).
M ETROLOGY
An optical molecular clock with an
instability of 1.2 × 10 –13 in 1 s has
been demonstrated by a
US/Russian partnership. The
apparatus, based on a HeNe laser
operating at 3.39 µm and the
methane F2 line, serves as a highly
accurate optical frequency standard
in the near and mid-infrared. It was
developed by scientists from the
National Institute of Standards and
Technology in Colorado, the Lebedev
Physical Institute in Moscow and
Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. “Our set-up represents a
compact, reliable clock with high
stability and exceedingly low phasenoise,
which can in principle be
operated for long (more than 24 h)
periods,” say the researchers
(Optics Letters 30 570).
18 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

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TECHNOLOGY
R&D/PATENTS
SEMICONDUCTORS
QCLs reach record temperatures
Mid-infrared quantum cascade
lasers (QCLs) that operate at a
record-breaking temperature of
up to 400 K (123 °C) have been
fabricated by a team of scientists in
Germany. The semiconductor
lasers emit pulsed light at a wavelength
of 4.5 µm (Applied Physics
Letters 86 131107).
“These are the first 4.5 µm QCLs
working at up to 400 K,” explained
Quankui Yang from the Fraunhofer
Institute for Applied Solid
State Physics (IAF) in Freiburg,
Germany, where the devices were
made. “We are currently working
towards continuous-wave [CW]
operation and also trying to make
shorter-wavelength QCLs.”
The lasers consist of 25 periods
of GaInAs/AlAsSb active and
injection regions that are grown by
molecular beam epitaxy on InP
IAF
The IAF team: left to right are Karin Schäuble, Joachim Wagner, Lutz Kirste, Quankui
Yang, Christian Mann, Christian Manz, Klaus Köhler and Hanspeter Menner.
substrates. The 18 µm × 2.8 mm
devices emit up to 750 mW of
peak power per facet at room temperature,
and 30 mW at 400 K
when driven by a current of 5.5 A.
QCLs have the potential to be
convenient sources of mid-infrared
light. Improvements in semiconductor
technology mean that several
firms such as Alpes Lasers,
Laser Components and Cascade
Technologies are now offering commercial
versions for applications
such as gas sensing. However, until
recently, room-temperature operation
of short wavelength (less than
5 µm) QCLs was hard to achieve.
Yang cites two main reasons why
the IAF lasers operate at such high
temperatures. The first is a high
conduction-band offset of 1.6 eV
between the quantum well and barrier
materials used in the active and
injection regions. The second is the
high quality of its growth process.
“We are currently working in
the direction of CW operation by
optimizing both the design and
heat dissipation of the lasers,”
Yang told OLE. “Low-temperature
CW operation, or at least high
duty-cycle (more than 50%) operation,
of these short-wavelength
QCLs should be possible in the
near future.”
AWARDS
Ceramic motors provide optics
with a silent and reliable answer
A design of a new type of miniature linear motor
made from piezoelectric ceramics has been given
the all-clear by the US Patent and Trademark
Office. The developers – US firms Biophan
Technologies and New Scale Technologies – say
that the SQUIGGLE motor suits use in a wide
variety of medical and optical applications,
including wearable drug-delivery pumps and
automatic camera zoom lenses for mobile phones.
The motors, which have just four parts, are about
10 × 4 mm, and are allegedly more reliable than
conventional electric motors.
LICENSING
Bioluminescent genes prove
popular in medical imaging
Xenogen Corporation, US, is licensing its
biophotonic imaging technology to fellow US firm
MIR Preclinical Services. Xenogen’s IVIS Imaging
System injects bioluminescent genes into living
animals, then uses an ultrasensitive camera to
track the light emission to monitor the spread of
disease or the effects of a drug. “Biophotonic
PATENTS
imaging technology is becoming the new research
standard in drug development,” said Pamela
Contag, Xenogen’s president.
APPLICATIONS
Backscattered laser pulses
detect submarine signature
BAE Systems has devised a method of detecting
submarines that involves projecting pulsed laser
light down through a column of water and
monitoring the backscattered light or speckle
(WO 2005/026661). The set-up relies on
spotting the violent movement of particles in a
submarine’s wake against a background of
Brownian motion, which has sufficiently different
dynamics. Laser pulses are spaced at
10–100 µs intervals and the speckle patterns
imaged and cross-correlated on a detector array.
Miniature diffraction gratings
offer an alternative to barcodes
Tagging items with labels containing tiny
diffraction gratings could be a convenient and
secure way to track raw materials and
manufactured products, according to US firm
Cyvera Corporation. Technologies such as
barcodes, electronic microchips or radiofrequency
identification can be too large for some
applications or unable to withstand hostile
environments, say the authors of application
WO 2005/027031. Their design – a diffraction
grating sandwiched between two optical
substrates – provides a unique identification code
when illuminated by incident light. The code,
which takes the form of spatially distributed light,
can then be collected and analysed. The grating
element is said to provide more than 67 million
unique codes and withstand harsh conditions.
Philips investigates ultraviolet
LEDs as a sterilization method
Philips is attempting to patent a mercury-free, lowvoltage
disinfecting lamp that uses ultraviolet (UV)
LEDs emitting over the 250–280 nm wavelength
band (WO 2005/031881). “The germicidal action
curve shows that the maximum germicidal action
is obtained from UV light with a wavelength of
265 nm,” said the applicants. The scientists mix
semiconductor compounds such as InN, InGaN,
AlN or AlGaN to create an LED with a band-gap
energy of approximately 4.7 eV, which then emits
light at this optimum wavelength.
To search for recently published applications, visit http://www.wipo.int/pct/en/ and http://ep.espacenet.com.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
21

CLEO/QELS/PHAST
The combined CLEO, QELS and PhAST conference comes to Baltimore, US, at the end of
the month and has an action-packed programme ready for delegates.
The Optical Society of America (OSA) has
once again decided to combine its CLEO, QELS
and PhAST conferences into one actionpacked
week, following PhAST’s successful
debut at last year’s combined event in San
Francisco. This year’s events take place on
22–27 May in Baltimore, US, and there’s no
shortage of things to do.
The Conference on Lasers and Electrooptics
(CLEO) and the Quantum Electronics
and Laser Science (QELS) conference are now
in their 24th year. Running alongside them
for the second time is a more applicationfocused
event called Photonic Applications
Systems Technologies (PhAST).
“With more than 1500 technical presentations
and tutorials lined up and approximately
300 companies exhibiting, the
conferences are shaping up to be the
strongest to date,” Colleen Morrison from the
OSA told OLE. “For PhAST’s second year, we
have exciting new programming to add to
the fold: along with the conference’s focus on
applications, we are showcasing a number of
key business and management topics.”
One example of the business programme is
a “Power Lunch” that has been organized by
Milton Chang, the founder of New Focus and
managing director of venture capital firm
Incubic. It takes place from 12.30 to 2.00 p.m.
on Tuesday 24 May, and will let attendees ask
J Hewett
The wait is over: CLEO 2005 comes to Baltimore on 22
May. Will it be as packed as last year’s show?
questions and share insights with industry,
business and technology leaders.
Well-known names at the lunch include
John Ambroseo, the CEO of Coherent, John
Carrano, a programme manager at DARPA,
Thomas Baer, co-founder of Arcturus Bioscience
and Gregory Olsen, the chairman of
Sensors Unlimited. The number of tickets is
limited, so register early.
A second business-related session, “Business
and Management Insights”, takes place
later the same day between 4.00 and
6.00 p.m. Olsen, Stephen Forrest and Henry
Kressel will give talks entitled “Starting and
Selling Two Optoelectronic Companies”,
“How Can Industry and Academia Get
Along?” and “The New International Business
Model for Technology Companies”. No
doubt a lively panel discussion will follow.
Other highlights include two impressive
plenary sessions. The first takes place on Monday
23 May at 6.00 p.m. and includes talks
from Shuji Nakamura, who will describe the
prospects for solid-state lighting, and Arpad
Bergh from the Optoelectronics Industry and
Development Association (OIDA).
The second plenary session starts at
8.00 a.m. on Wednesday 25 May and features
Christopher Contag from Stanford University,
who will talk on the optical imaging
of stem cells, and Deborah Jin from the University
of Colorado, who will describe the latest
developments in fermionic condensates.
Aside from the plenaries, there will be the
usual mix of technical sessions describing
the latest advances in photonics. CLEO and
QELS will have two special symposia on gravitational
wave detection and on the coherent
and quantum control of light.
“Another key area of focus this year is a
joint CLEO/PhAST symposium on active
remote sensing,” said Morrison. “This is the
first time that we’ve had a joint event and it
will explore everything from theoretical
research and development to real products.”
OLE and Optics.org will be present at this
year’s show and can be found at Booth 1359.
When: 22–27 May (conferences) and
24–26 May (exhibition)
Where: Baltimore Convention Center,
Maryland, US
What’s on: 23 May
● Technical sessions.
8.00 a.m. – 5.30 p.m.
● Plenary talks.
6.00 p.m.
Shuji Nakamura of the University of California on
the future prospects of solid-state lighting, and
Arpad Bergh of the OIDA.
What’s on: 24 May
● Exhibition and career centre.
10.00 a.m. – 5.00 p.m.
● Power Lunch with industry leaders.
12.30–2.00 p.m.
● Poster session.
1.00–2.30 p.m.
ESSENTIAL INFORMATION
● Business and Management Insights.
4.00–6.00 p.m.
Gregory Olsen of Sensors Unlimited on “Starting and
Selling Two Optoelectronic Companies”; Stephen
Forrest of Princeton University on “How Can Industry
and Academia Get Along?”; Henry Kressel of
Warburg Pincus on “The New International Business
Model For Technology Companies”.
● CLEO panel session.
6.30–7.30 p.m.
“Laser-Based Gas Sensing: Research Project or
Commercial Reality?” A discussion on the future
prospects of laser-based gas sensor technologies.
Panelists include: Mickey Frisch of Physical
Sciences Inc; Bill Gignac of Picarro; Murty Neti of
California Analytical Instruments; Marty Spartz of
MKS Instruments; and Hubert Braendle of ABB.
What’s on: 25 May
● PhAST plenary session.
8.00 a.m.
Christopher Contag of Stanford University on the
optical imaging of stem cells, and Deborah Jin of the
University of Colorado on fermionic condensates.
● Exhibition and career centre.
10.00 a.m. – 5.00 p.m.
● Poster session.
12.00–1.30 p.m.
● Conference reception.
6.30–8.00 p.m.
What’s on: 26 May
● Exhibition and career centre.
10.00 a.m. – 4.00 p.m.
● Poster session.
1.00–2.30 p.m.
● Post-deadline paper session.
8.00–10.00 p.m.
For more information about CLEO, QELS and
PhAST, please visit www.cleoconference.org and
www.phastconference.org.
22 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

INTERVIEW
Photonics report advises
new direction for Europe
Can European photonics remain competitive with firms in Asia and the US? Yes, but only if
a new, unified approach to research is adopted, says EPIC. Oliver Graydon investigates.
Europe needs a common, unified approach to
photonics research to achieve the economy
of scale necessary to compete with the US
and Asia, and properly address the markets of
the 21st century. That’s the conclusion of a
new report drawn up by the European Photonics
Industry Consortium (EPIC) and the
Association of German Engineers (VDI).
The 20-page report, entitled “Photonics
for the 21st century – a consolidated European
photonics research initiative”, provides
a detailed analysis of the state of optics in the
EU, clearly spelling out the strengths, weaknesses
and opportunities.
It has been drawn together from information
and opinions gathered from 60 leaders of
well-known firms and research establishments
across Europe. Open up the report and
many of the most influential CEOs and CTOs
in photonics can be found to have signed their
names in support of the proposal: Dieter Kurz
from Carl Zeiss, Paul Hyland from Aixtron,
Gerd Litfin from LINOS, Ulrich Hefter from
Rofin Sinar and Mike Scott from Bookham
Technology, to name a few.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
EPIC is lobbying the EC to create a dedicated research platform for photonics within FP7.
Recommendations
So what exactly do they recommend? As a first
step the partners want to persuade the European
Commission (EC) to create and fund a
dedicated photonics technology area within
its Seventh Framework Programme (FP7).
“People who work in photonics often
describe it as a great enabling technology in
areas such as communications and biomedicine,”
explained Tom Pearsall from EPIC.
“Our starting point is exactly the opposite. Our
idea is that photonics is actually a strategic
technology in its own right.”
Part of the problem seems to be that European
research is fragmented and dispersed.
According to the report, the photonics industry
in Europe has become complex and
multidisciplinary after just a few decades of
existence, and about two-thirds of the photonics
workforce is employed by SMEs.
“We want to bring together people who
have a common interest in photonics, be it at
the research and development or manufacturing
levels,” Pearsall continued. “European
photonics is a very innovative sector
but is made up of lots of SMEs and has never
had this kind of unified approach, so it’s a big
step forward to get people to work together.
This report shows the EC that the European
photonics community is unified in wanting
to build conditions for sustainable growth.”
From reading the report it is clear that the
economic importance of the photonics sector
to Europe cannot be ignored. It states that, in
2003, photonics was responsible for 500 000
jobs, products worth a total of 760 bn and
15 000 patents. If the sector is properly supported,
the report claims that these figures
will rise to 1.5 million jobs, 7250 bn products
and 45 000 patents by 2010.
According to the report, photonics is currently
used in five main application areas:
● information, communication and imaging;
● lighting and displays;
● manufacturing;
● lifesciences and healthcare
● safety and security.
Of these, the European photonics industry
currently leads the world in two: solid-state
(LED) lighting and laser-assisted manufacturing.
In the former, European companies
“Without strong
leadership, many
industries will be
vulnerable to
competition from
the US and Asia.”
Thomas Pearsall, EPIC
such as Philips and Osram account for 30%
of the world market, and the prospects for
growth are huge.
“High-brightness LEDs are expected to be
used in automobiles in significant volumes
from around 2008,” commented Pearsall.
“We estimate that, by then, 60 million cars
will be sold per year, each containing 200
LEDs. That’s an annual requirement of
12 billion LEDs.” The big question is: can
Europe compete with Asia when it comes to
supplying such huge volumes in a cost-
▲
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effective manner?
Pearsall is confident: “Does the LED industry
in Europe have any idea that it will
need such a production capacity? Of course
it does,” he told OLE. “Osram Opto Semiconductors
has built an LED plant in Germany
that is capable of churning out
4 billion LEDs per month. That’s why I am
optimistic about the prospects of the European
optoelectronics industry.”
Pearsall clearly believes that, given the
appropriate support and investment, Europe
can have a prosperous future and maintain
its leading research position. And it’s not
just lighting where Europe has a critical
strength – in the use of lasers as manufacturing
tools, firms such as Trumpf and Rofin
Sinar dominate the market, meaning that
50% of world sales of laser-manufacturing
equipment go to Europe.
Another booming sector is European
machine vision. This has grown at 10–30%
per year in the past decade and looks set to
continue to rise in the foreseeable future. In
addition, the market for next-generation displays
based on organic light-emitting diodes
(OLEDs) is forecast to grow at 40% per year
over the next five years. In this area, Philips,
Merck, Covion, Cambridge Display Technology
and numerous other European firms are
leading the development of materials and
the fabrication processes that are needed.
Action needed
In all of these areas, industry leaders are now
convinced that action is needed to help to
ensure that Europe fights off the strong competition
from abroad in the future. “Only a
coordinated approach can make use of the
economies of scale necessary to sustain economic
production in Europe and reach the
critical mass of investment needed to address
the big markets of the 21st century,” states
the report. “Without strong European leadership
in photonics technologies, many
industries will be left vulnerable to strong
competition from the US and Asia.”
At the time of writing, EPIC is waiting to
hear back from the EC to see if the idea is to be
implemented and it will be having a meeting
with commissioners later this month. EPIC
also hopes that by bringing firms together at
its regular workshops, it can also help to
address the situation.
Founded in 2003, the EPIC consortium
now has 55 members and last held a workshop
on photonics in the automobile industry
last November (OLE January 2005 p23).
It has a second on OLEDs planned for June in
Cambridge, UK. Part of the aim of these
workshops is to draw up technology roadmaps
for the different application areas
where European photonics is being used.
“I don’t want to underestimate the difficulty
in writing a good roadmap, but we are
well on the way to doing it, sector by sector,”
said Pearsall. “I hope that, by the end of
2006, we will have something that starts to
look like a photonics roadmap organized by
major application areas, which identifies the
opportunities and the technical developments
that need to happen.”
One of Pearsall’s chief concerns is the state
of the European optical communications
industry, which suffered during the recent
INTERVIEW
telecoms downturn. “This area has been
devastated. The threat is that a tremendous
amount of know-how and skills that were
developed in Europe to pursue this technology
are being lost with the downturn of business,”
Pearsall commented. “We want to find
ways to help businesses to convert their technology
to other applications.”
■
Further information: the report “Photonics for the
21st century” can be downloaded from EPIC’s
website at http://www.epic-assoc.com.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
25

ASSEMBLY
Optical manipulation pla
Danish scientists have harnessed the power of light
beams to manipulate 3D arrangements of particles at the
click of a mouse button. Rob van den Berg reports.
A good description of Jesper Glückstad would
be an architect of the microscopic world.
Over the past two years, he and his coworkers
Peter John Rodrigo, Vincent Daria
and Ivan Perch-Nielsen have been developing
machinery to manipulate micrometresized
particles into 3D structures at the click
of a mouse button. What’s more, the
research team, from the Risø National
Laboratory in Roskilde, Denmark, do this
using nothing but focused beams of light.
The team’s apparatus opens up promising
new possibilities in the field of materials
science and biomedical research – assembling
photonic crystals, seeding crystal
growth or sorting cell colonies are just a few
examples. When OLE spoke to Glückstad,
he was about to leave for the US to meet
with scientists from the National Institute of
Health, who are keen to apply his technique
to cancer and cell research.
Although the concept of the optical trapping
of particles has been around for some
time (Alan Ashkin and his co-workers from
Bell Labs in the US demonstrated optical
tweezers in the mid-eighties), Glückstad’s
approach allows many particles to be manipulated
simultaneously in realtime.
Instead of using a single laser beam to trap
a particle, which has the disadvantage that it
can escape if the beam is not tightly focused,
the Danish team uses a pair of laser beams to
move each particle. “A particle can be trapped
between two counter-propagating beams
that have their waists slightly separated along
the optical axis,” explained Glückstad.
This dual-beam approach, which Glückstad
fondly refers to as an “optical elevator”,
has several benefits over conventional optical
tweezers and traps. “Optical tweezers require
objective lenses with a very high numerical
aperture (NA) to generate a sufficiently strong
gradient force. If such a lens is used away from
the design plane, the focus is smeared out and
the particle is lost,” said Glückstad.
“Also, when working with live cells, it is
better not to focus too tightly in order not to
damage the organelles inside the cell,” he
continued. “We can work with much simpler
optics and can also move them [the particles]
over a much larger depth, even out of
view of the microscope lens.”
By changing the relative powers of two
opposing, orthogonally polarized laser beams,
Glückstad and his colleagues can vary the
axial position of a trapped particle by tens of
micrometres. And, thanks to a highly efficient
phase-and polarization encoding scheme,
they can generate many simultaneous elevators
to trap and manipulate up to 80 particles
with less than 1 W of near-infrared laser light.
The power of polarization
The apparatus works as follows: an expanded
TEM 00 mode from a Ti:sapphire laser at
830 nm illuminates a spatial light modulator
(SLM) and becomes encoded with a 2D phasedistribution.
“This phase distribution can be
represented by a spatial pattern of up to 256
levels on a computer monitor, where each
grey level represents a different phase-delay
between 0 and 2 pi,” explained Glückstad.
“This is then projected onto the surface of
a spatial polarization monitor (SPM), which
acts as a variable waveplate,” he continued,
“and endows each beam with varying components
of s-polarized and p-polarized
light.” Finally, a polarizing beamsplitter separates
the orthogonal (s and p) components
of the beams before they are directed to the
sample via microscope objectives.
The beauty of the process is that it all
occurs rapidly and with almost no optical
loss. The system is aligned in such a way that
the s and p beams are focused along a common
optical axis, but have a slight axial separation
in order to perform the trapping.
Controlling the relative intensities of the two
beams adjusts the position at which a particle
finds its equilibrium. In principle, this
could be done with any two counter-propagating
beams, but, as Glückstad explained:
“We use orthogonal polarizations because
the beams should not show any interference.
We do not want them to see each other.”
User-friendly system
Glückstad’s team have developed the system
to be as user-friendly as possible. “There
is no need to calculate anything – [to operate
the traps] one just images the particles
on the screen and superimposes them with
a cursor. It is like clicking and dragging
icons on your PC,” said Glückstad. “With
Risø National Laboratory
The Danish team has used its system to organize tiny 2–3 µm-diam
patterns, including a pyramid. Particles manipulated to form the
different heights (middle right, bottom). Schematic of the particl
“We have made a
wonderful tool.
Now we want to
apply it.”
Jesper Glückstad
the left mouse button you can move them
around in the plane, and with the right button
you can determine the depth. The speed
with which we can move the particles
around is tremendous – up to 25 µm/s.” A
further benefit of the system is that it offers
a 3D view of the location of the particles
while they are being manipulated. “This
capability is unique, since it allows us full
visualization and precise position and velocity
control,” commented Glückstad.
To demonstrate the potential of the technique,
the team have assembled 2–3 µmdiameter
polystyrene and silica spheres into
26 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

ys tricks with particles
Risø National Laboratory
Risø National Laboratory
phase-only spatial
light modulator
polarizing
beam-splitter
s-pol
illuminator
dichroic mirror
microscope
objective
eter polystyrene and silicon dioxide spheres (far right) into 3D
letters GPC in a single plane (middle right, top) and at three
e manipulation system (right).
computer
CW Ti:sa
laser
Nd:YVO 4
laser
spatial
polarization
modulator
p-pol
relay
optics
sample
dichroic mirror
CCD
camera
all kinds of 3D arrangements (see above),
such as a pyramid and a series of letters
(Applied Physics Letters, 14 February 2005).
Real-world applications
Significantly, the wavelength of 830 nm is
not absorbed by living tissue, so living biological
matter can be manipulated without any
risk of damage. In an upcoming paper in the
journal FEMS Microbiology Letters, the Danish
team also reports the first “real-world”
application of the technique: a study of the
growth of different yeast species.
“It has been found that, when mixing two
types of yeast – S cerevisiae (S101) and
Huvarum– the strong S101 cells surround
the weaker uvarum cells and stop them from
growing. With our traps, we were able to
controllably surround the individual cells of
one species with those of another [and
analyse the affect on growth],” said Glückstad.
“We found that the average generation
time of surrounded cells was 15% longer
than that of non-surrounded cells, thereby
showing that confinement inhibits growth.”
In a further paper in the online journal
Optics Express, Glückstad and his team
describe experiments with low-NA optics
and a long working-distance of more than
10 mm. The result is not only a much wider
manipulation region, but also a larger fieldof-view
for imaging.
“We can observe the trapped particles
simultaneously from the top and from the
side. Such visual data could, in principle, be
obtained using a confocal microscope, but
we can now capture images from two
orthogonal planes simultaneously and in
realtime,” said Glückstad. “This enables us to
calibrate and fine-tune the counterpropagating
beams and observe the dynamics
of particles that lie well outside the focal
plane of an ordinary top-view microscope.”
The long working-distance also makes it
possible to manipulate particles in devices like
microfluidic (lab-on-a-chip) systems that are
too cumbersome to fit into a microscope
equipped with high-NA immersion objectives.
In the near future, Glückstad hopes to do
experiments with stem cells. These are
embryonic cells that can develop in different
ways depending on the cells that surround
them. By surrounding them selectively with
specific cell types, he would like to check their
development in a controlled way. He also
wants to investigate cancer cells and is currently
drafting several project proposals with
scientists from the US.
Apart from finding promising applications
for his technique, Glückstad has worked
hard to design and build a commercial system,
and has been talking to manufacturers
who are interested in marketing an
upgraded version of the set-up.
“It [the new version] will be much simpler,
more robust and faster than our current one.
There have been new developments in SLM
technology,” said Glückstad. “The ones we
are using are based on nematic liquid crystals,
which are relatively slow and offer a
refresh rate of some 5 fps. Nowadays, this can
be done several orders of magnitude faster.”
Rob van den Berg is a freelance science and
technology journalist based in the Netherlands.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
27

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METROLOGY
Optical sensor helps to
speed up car production
French firm ActiCM’s high-speed, vision-based co-ordinate measuring machine is
grabbing the attention of big names in the car industry. James Tyrrell finds out why.
ActiCM’s robot-mounted imaging system
promises to slash car body-inspection times
by a factor of five or more. French carmaker
Renault is so impressed with the
company’s vision-based co-ordinate measuring
machine (CMM) that it plans to purchase
a system in 2005.
“Renault’s problem is like that of every car
manufacturer using traditional mechanical
CMMs,” Antonio Mendes Nazare of ActiCM
told OLE. “To inspect and validate an assembled
car body involves measuring about
2000 elements. With a traditional mechanical
CMM, this takes about 10 h.”
Considering that Renault was applying a
series of mechanical, probe-based measurements
to every one of the thousands of
vehicles rolling off its production line, it is
clear that the car-maker has a great deal to
gain from a faster way of validating car
body shape. “[About two years ago] they
launched a benchmarking process with all
the big names in CMM to try and find some
other solutions,” explained Mendes Nazare.
“The firms came to Renault and demonstrated
what they had to sell, but none of
them were satisfactory.”
At that time, ActiCM, which was founded
in 2000 by two former French Atomic
Energy Commission (CEA) engineers, was
still developing its vision-based alternative.
From its Moirans location near Grenoble,
France, the firm was busy investigating the
idea of combining digital-image processing
with photogrammetry – a technique for
extracting 3D co-ordinates from 2D images.
ActiCM was so confident in its new technology
that it took its optical sensor concept
to Renault. Interested, the car-maker asked
the firm to assemble a pilot system that could
be put through its paces at the plant.
As part of its benchmarking process,
Renault requested that machines deliver an
accuracy of 300 µm over the whole car
body on the production-line site. “This is
important because [although] the big
CMMs can achieve 50 µm, when you put
them in a factory environment they are not
better than 300 µm,” said Mendes Nazare.
“With a vision-based non-contact system
ActiCM
In the driving seat: ActiCM’s non-contact, fully automatic 3D optical measuring system accelerates the
validation of car body shape using a mix of digital image-processing and photogrammetry.
we can achieve the same accuracy as traditional
CMMs on the whole volume of the
car body, but much, much faster.”
Mendes Nazare boasts that ActiCM’s pilot
system has cut the time taken to perform the
2000-element validation from 10 h down to
2 h, with multiple sensors offering further
reductions. “With four sensors they [carmakers]
can get down to 30 min for the
whole car measurement,” he explained, “20
times faster than conventional CMMs.”
System details
Placed on a robot, up to eight of ActiCM’s
sensors can work together simultaneously
on the same part. The first step is to capture
an image and the second is to process this
image to extract 3D co-ordinate information.
To validate the part, these co-ordinates are
referred to a computer-aided-design file and
compared with original specifications.
Dubbed an intelligent vision device (IVD),
each sensor unit has two high-definition
(multi-megapixel) CCD cameras, a visible
LED illumination source and a white-light
projector. The system can also operate under
ambient lighting conditions if they provide
sufficient contrast. “It is called an intelligent
vision device because it knows what light
source to use,” said Mendes Nazare. “The
system switches between different lights
depending on what it has to measure.”
The IVD’s onboard cameras are able to
image a part from two different and known
positions. These two views can then be geometrically
manipulated by the device software
using photogrammetry, a method which
dates back to the 1850s, to extract 3D data.
“Today, photogrammetry is a well-known
technique, but actually it was not used very
much until 15–20 years ago because of the
amount of calculation it requires,”
▲
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
29

METROLOGY
commented Mendes Nazare. “Only with
increases of computing power has it become
possible to use it in industry.”
Advantages
Although the IVD is robot-mounted, the
mechanical arm is simply there to guide the
sensor around the car body and enable an
initial camera calibration. “The robot is
really just a way of transporting the IVD. I
could [in principle] guide the IVD by hand,”
said Mendes Nazare.
The sensor’s CCD images provide all necessary
distance and depth information. This is
a big advantage as it means that the accuracy
of the device, unlike many conventional
CMMs, is not related to the positional accuracy
of the robot. What’s more, an imagingbased
approach is much faster.
“A [camera] picture covers 1 × 1 m, and
every element within this picture will be
measured,” explained Mendes Nazare.
“This means that, if you have 50 elements
within the picture, in around a second you
will have 50 acquisitions, which is why our
system is so fast.”
Imaging technology offers further advantages
over conventional CMMs when it
comes to re-examining data. “When you
have a CMM, you have to make a sequence
tree,” said Mendes Nazare. “You have to tell
the system what elements you want to measure.”
In effect, once the car-body measurement
has been performed, co-ordinate data
will exist only for elements that have been
specified within the tree, unless you happen
to be using ActiCM’s device.
The firm’s “all-seeing” CMM allows
designers and engineers to go back to the
sensor’s original images and reprocess them
to measure elements missing from the original
sequence tree. “This is something very
new [for the industry], because, previously, if
you didn’t think of measuring something at
the time, it was lost,” explained Mendes
Nazare. “Now, even if you think an element
is unimportant [today] you can still find its
position [tomorrow] on the image library.”
Attracting interest
With such a powerful system in its hands, it
is no surprise that ActiCM has attracted
interest from a number of major automotive
firms. Although working closely
with Renault, ActiCM also has relationships
with Hyundi, Toyota and Nissan. Mendes
Nazare stresses that every car-manufacturing
plant is a potential deployment site
for the company’s vision-based technology.
“We are manufacturing two systems,”
said Mendes Nazare, “a fully portable unit
[Acturis] and a second high-speed noncontact
CMM [Advent] for production-line
control and inspection.”
The firm has taken great strides to commercialize
the technology from its origins at
the CEA. “It took about three or four years to
industrialize, because at the CEA it was
mainly theory,” revealed Mendes Nazare.
“We came up with the first product [Acurist]
at the end of 2003 and, at the same time, we
were ready to start the Advent, which is
when Renault purchased the pilot.”
The pilot system took ActiCM one year to
make and was delivered to Renault last year,
passing its validation in December. Mendes
Nazare estimates that, depending on the
nature of the application and the measurement
speed required, the purchase price of
its Advent system will be somewhere within
the 7200 000–500 000 range.
“The first application was for car-body
measurement, but now we have requests
from manufacturers for doors and
bumpers,” Mendes Nazare said. “[Outside of
the automotive sector] we have had requests
from the aerospace industry.”
■
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

PRODUCT GUIDE
High-power diode lasers
offer efficient answer
High-power diode bars that are highly efficient and boast output powers of hundreds of
watts are now commercially available. Merrill Apter gives a tutorial on the technology.
It is widely recognized that high-power diode
lasers (HPDLs) are compact, portable and
highly reliable. Recent advances in their output
power and the efficiency of their electricalto-optical
power conversion (more than 50%)
are making them increasingly attractive for a
wide range of industrial applications.
The main focus of this article will be diodelaser
bars, which are made from broad-area
edge-emitting semiconductor chips, and generate
high-power continuous-wave (CW) or
quasi-CW light. The aim is to provide new
users of HPDLs with an understanding of
their basic technical aspects and guidance on
how to specify devices when purchasing
them. Commonly used rules of thumb within
the industry are also presented.
The basics explained
HPDLs are designed for three distinct modes of
operation: classical CW; quasi-CW; and
pulsed or high peak-power. Their typical operational
characteristics are defined in the box
(right). HPDLs can be constructed as singleemitter
devices, 1D arrays (called bars), or 2D
arrays of stacked bars.
An HPDL bar consists of a thin piece of
semiconductor that features multiple broadarea
emitters arranged in a line, with a small
gap between each one. Bar dimensions are
typically 140 µm high by 1 mm deep by
10 mm wide, and contain between 10 and 60
emitters precisely spaced along the bar.
The laser light is actually generated within
a small (less than 1 µm high by 150 µm wide)
active region in each emitter called the diode
junction, and exits through the edge of the
semiconductor. The result is that an array of
small parallel light beams called “beamlets”
are generated by the emitters and propagate
away from the bar.
An important factor in bar design is its
fill-factor. This describes the percentage of
the bar that is occupied by emitters, and
equals the width of one emitter divided by
the centre-to-centre spacing between emitters.
A typical bar might have 19 emitters,
each 150 µm wide, on 500 µm centres,
resulting in a 30% fill-factor. Commercially
available conduction-cooled bars with a
nLight Photonics
An HPDL mounted on a heatsink to remove waste heat that is generated during high-power operation.
Operational characteristics
Mode of operation CW Quasi-CW Pulsed
Pulse width n/a hundreds of µs hundreds of ns
Duty cycle 100% less than 5% 1 kHz
Rated output power 50 W 100 W peak 30–50W peakfrom
a conduction- power/bar power device
cooled package
30% fill-factor and 1 mm-long cavity can
produce up to 40 W of total CW power,
while water-cooled versions with an 80%
fill-factor can provide up to 100 W CW.
When output powers of more than about
100 W are required, bars can be stacked in a
2D array. In this case, bar pitch refers to the
centre-to-centre spacing between bars along
horizontal spacing or a vertical stacking
direction. These 2D arrays potentially emit
incredible amounts of CW power from a very
compact package. For example, a 10-bar 2D
vertical stack array with a pitch of 1.8 mm
might have an emission region measuring
16.2 × 10 mm. If each bar consists of 64
emitters generating 100 W, then the 2D
array will have 640 emitters and a total
power of 1 kW CW.
▲
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
31

High Brightness
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www.apolloinstruments.com

Beam characteristics
To describe the beam characteristics of a
diode bar, it is useful to visualize the beam
propagating in the z-direction, with the
height of the active region along the y-axis
and its width along the x-axis. Owing to the
asymmetric shape of each emitter’s active
region (typically 1 µm high by 150 µm wide),
the output beam from a bar is elliptical and
astigmatic (beam-waist occurs at different
locations in the x- and y-axes).
The beam in the y-axis is usually singletransverse-mode
or diffraction-limited. As
the height of the active region is so small,
beam-divergence is usually very high – up to
30–40° full-angle at half-maximum power
points. For this reason, the y-axis is also
often called the fast axis of beam divergence.
In contrast, the beam in the x-axis is
highly multimode, i.e. it has many transverse
modes, and usually has a smaller
beam-divergence of about 10° FWHM. The
divergence is reduced because the width of
the active region is so much larger than its
height. Owing to the reduced beam-divergence,
this axis is often referred to as the
slow axis of beam divergence.
How to specify HPDLs
Wavelength: One of the first questions to
consider when purchasing an HPDL is the
wavelength of operation. Devices are commercially
available with wavelengths spanning
the 635–1600 nm range, but with
some gaps in coverage. Semiconductor
material systems include:
● AlGaInP/GaAs (635–700 nm)
● AlInGaAsP/GaAs (780–1000 nm)
● InGaAsP/InP (1250–1700 nm).
However, it is important to specify not just
the desired centre-wavelength, but also the
acceptable tolerance, as this strongly influences
price. A useful rule of thumb is that the
broader the centre-wavelength tolerance,
the lower the price of the HPDL as the production
yield increases. A standard tolerance
on peak wavelength might be:
● ±3 nm for an 800 nm laser
● ±5 nm for a 900–980 nm laser and red
diode laser
● ±10 nm for a 1400 nm or longer-wavelength
diode laser.
When emission bandwidth is important,
one may specify the full-width-at-halfmaximum
(FWHM) of the output beam. This
is the spectral width, in nanometres, of the
laser at the 50%-of-peak-power points. Alternatively,
one might specify the full-width at
10% of peak, or the 1/e 2 width, which is the
full-width at 13.5%-of-peak-power points.
High-power bars at 6xx, 8xx and 9xx nm
usually have spectral widths of 2–3 nm
FWHM, while the spectral width in the
nLight Photonics
14xx nm and longer range is considerably
broader, sometimes by a factor of 5–8.
Lifetime: Another important parameter is
the lifetime of the diode laser. This is a measure
of its reliability and describes how long a
typical device will operate before it fails.
Today, the latest high-quality manufacturing
techniques ensure that most manufacturers
quote figures of tens of thousands
PRODUCT GUIDE
CS mount package for a laser-diode bar: the 1 cm-long bar is attached to a heatsink to remove waste heat
and the package measures around 1 × 1 × 0.25 inches (above). A timeline of the affordability and output
power of 1 cm laser-diode bar (below). Improvements have enabled the devices to become industrial tools.
price per CW watt
affordability price/W
$2000/W
10 W
$600/W
20 W
$100/W
40 W
60 W
$40/W
80 W
$30/W
100 W
power
125 W
1987 1989 1991 1993 1995 1997 1999 2001 2003 2005 2007 2009 2011
output power, CW
of hours. However, it is important to
remember that these lifetime figures are
only valid for a particular set of operating
conditions, which specify drive current,
device temperature and output power. Deviations
from the specified values are possible
without catastrophically damaging the
laser, but usually reduce its lifetime.
A further rule of thumb is that diodelaser
lifetime halves for each 10 °C increase
in case temperature above room temperature.
Conversely, diode-laser lifetime can be
increased by reducing the drive current,
output power and temperature. Don’t cool
the device too much as condensation forming
on the mirror facets could adversely
affect the laser operation.
Output power: In general, output power
scales linearly with increasing emitter
▲
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
33

PRODUCT GUIDE
width. For semiconductor materials that
lase at 800 and 900 nm wavelengths, output
power facet density is around
20–30 mW/µm of emitter width. Red diode
lasers achieve about 5 mW/µm of emitter
width, and lasers of 1400 nm or longer
achieve 10–15 mW/µm. Lengthening the
cavity of the emitter enhances its power
output. Cavity lengths are typically in the
0.6–1 mm range.
Polarization: A parameter that is often overlooked
is the laser’s emission polarization.
Transverse-electric (TE) means that the emitted
beam’s electric-field polarization vector is
parallel to the x-axis (plane of the diode junction).
Transverse-magnetic (TM) means the
magnetic-field vector is parallel to the diode
junction plane, and the electric-field vector lies
in a perpendicular direction along the y-axis.
Packaging and cooling: Conduction-cooled
diode-laser bars are usually mounted on an
open heatsink and can be enclosed in an environmentally
sealed package to protect it and
ease handling. Depending on the level of
integration and sophistication, these enclosed
packages can include internal thermoelectric
coolers (a means to cool the diode) and thermistors
(a means to measure and monitor the
diode laser’s case temperature). Water-cooled
or actively cooled bars mounted on microchannel
“coolers” can also be housed in the
same types of sealed packages.
Low-power diode bars can also be conductively
cooled using a CS package or
something similar. A CS package is an
industry-recognized package in which a
single 1 cm × 1 mm diode bar is soldered to
the heatsink or anode. A typical CS package
measures 1 × 1 × 0.25 inches thick.
For higher-power bars emitting more than
50 W CW, water cooling is required to remove
the heat that is generated. In this case, the
solid copper block of the CS package is
replaced by one with water channels that
enable a turbulent flow of water to get close to
the diode-bar junction and remove heat.
Water-cooled packages include copper
macrochannel coolers (thermal resistance
of ±0.5–0.6 °C/W) and copper microchannel
coolers (0.2–0.3 °C/W). Silicon
microchannel packages – not yet commercially
available – replace the copper with a
silicon mounting-plate, and have etched
microchannels that bring waterflow to
within 100 µm of the diode bar, to achieve
thermal resistance of 0.1–0.15 °C/W.
The temperature of the diode laser may
need to be actively stabilized to maximize its
lifetime, or to stabilize its peak-emission
wavelength. The emission wavelength shifts
to longer wavelengths as the temperature
rises. The shift is material-dependent and
typical values are:
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
● 0.18 nm/°C for red diode-lasers.
● 0.28 nm/°C for 800 nm devices
● 0.34 nm/°C for 900 nm devices
● 0.4 nm/°C for 14xx nm devices
www.bfioptilas.com
Optics/output options for diode bars
Microlens: Diode bars can be purchased with
a microlens that is the same length as the bar
and collimates all of the diverging beamlets in
the fast-axis plane simultaneously. The diameter
of the collimated beam roughly equals
the focal length of the microlens and is usually
300–1000 µm FWHM.
Residual divergence after collimation is
typically 0.2–3° FWHM, depending on the
type of microlens used and how accurately
it is aligned. Microlenses are available in a
variety of shapes, such as circular and
aspheric cross-sections. Some manufacturers
supply diode bars with micro-optics to
collimate emission in the slow-axis plane as
well, but this is less common.
Multimode fibre: It is possible to purchase
diode bars with an attached multimode
Optical
Instrumentation
Laser Power&
Energy Meters
European Calibration & Service Centre
Laser Beam
Analysis
European Calibration & Service Centre
Photometry &
Colorimetry
European Calibration & Service Centre
Laser Diode Power
Supplies
For CW & QCW Lasers
Wavelength &
Spectral Analysis
Wavefront Analysis
BFi OPTiLAS European Offices : Belgium: info.be@bfioptilas.com
Denmark: info.dk@bfioptilas.com - France: info.fr@bfioptilas.com
Germany: info.de@bfioptilas.com - Italy: info.it@bfioptilas.com
Spain: info.es@bfioptilas.com - The Netherlands: info.nl@bfioptilas.com
Sweden: info.se@bfioptilas.com - UK: info.uk@bfioptilas.com
▲
35

PRODUCT GUIDE
optical-fibre bundle. The individual fibres
within the bundle (at the launch end) are
arranged in a linear array to enable one-toone
butt-coupling to the diode emitters.
The delivery end of the fibre bundle usually
has the fibres arranged in a close-packed
hexagonal configuration that enables the
output beam to be coupled into a single multimode
optical fibre or other circular-shaped
aperture. The fibre bundle may be terminated
with an SMA or other fibre connector. For
example, emission from the fibre bundle
might have a diameter of 0.8 mm and a
numerical aperture of 0.12 (full-angle beamdivergence
of 14°). Using an appropriate
lens, the light from the bundle can be coupled
into a single multimode fibre with a core size
of 0.4 mm and numerical aperture of 0.25.
Quasi-CW output: Although diode bars can
also be operated in a CW or quasi-CW emission
mode, the term quasi-CW is used most
often in the context of 2D laser-diode arrays.
For quasi-CW emission, drive current to
the diode array is modulated on and off in a
your European destination for optics and electronics
www.ELCAN.com/europe
repetitive fashion so that each “emission
on” interval is followed by an “emission off ”
interval. The duty factor of the quasi-CW
emission is the percentage of time that the
emission is on.
For example, if the “on” time is 1 ms, and
the “off ” time is 4 ms, then the duty factor is
20%. Peak power refers to the emitted
power level when emission is on, whereas
average power refers to power averaged over
many on/off cycles. Average power is calculated
by simply multiplying the peak power
by the duty factor.
2D diode-laser arrays designed for quasi-
CW operation can generate much higher
peak-power levels than those designed for CW
operation. This comes from the use of diode
bars with much higher fill-factors – 80–90%
instead of the 30–50% fill-factors used for CW
bars. The higher fill-factor roughly doubles
the peak power compared with a CW array
which uses the same number of bars.
Cost and pricing: Factors that influence the
price of HPDLs include required lifetime,
output power and brightness (W/unit emission
area and per-unit solid-angle of beamdivergence),
wavelength and wavelength
tolerance, and the need for water-cooling.
Purchase quantity is another very important
cost factor. Per-unit pricing may be
reduced by 30–50% when purchasing in
volumes of 100–1000 units.
Packaged diode bars generally cost
$1000–3000 (7770–2300), depending on
output power, package design and the manufacturer.
A 40 W bar usually costs
$1500–2500, depending on volumes and
specifications, while fibre-coupling can easily
increase price by 50–100%.
The pricing of 2D arrays scales in terms of
the number of bars. Copper microchannelcooled
arrays are priced at $1000–2000/bar.
The good news for users is that, over the last
decade, as manufacturing processes have
become more robust, competition has grown
and diode lasers have steadily reduced in price.
Today, there are many options for designing
and specifying diode-laser bars.
Although there is some standardization
within the HPDL industry, it is more the
exception than the rule. For the most part,
every manufacturer provides a slight product
variant which may not be obvious at
first glance. Potential purchasers must
make sure that they understand how a
specification has been described and measured
in order to get the best deal. ■
Merrill Apter is vice-president of sales and
marketing at nLight Corporation, a volume
manufacturer of high-power laser diodes based in
Vancouver, Washington State, US. For more
information visit www.nlight.net.
36 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

PRODUCTS
If you would like your company’s products to be featured in this section,
please send press releases and images to James Tyrrell (james.tyrrell@iop.org).
Synthetic sapphire
RUBIS-PRECIS
French materials
specialist RUBIS-
PRECIS can now supply
a range of synthetic
sapphire optical
components such as
lenses, windows, balls,
tubes and rods. The parts suit a variety of
scientific and industrial applications including
lasers, sensors and precision bearings. Second
only to diamond in hardness, sapphire is a
good electrical insulator, resists acidic and
alkaline conditions, and is stable at high
temperatures (2000 °C). It is also able to
transmit light across the ultraviolet, visible and
infrared bands from 0.2 to 5 µm. RUBIS-PRECIS
says that it can supply parts from individual
prototypes in quantities of up to hundreds of
thousands of units.
www.rubis-precis.com
Machine vision
Firstsight Vision
The NetSight II DCL
from Firstsight Vision is
an embedded
machine-vision engine
with dual CameraLink
interface. The unit, an alternative to the PC-type
framegrabber, provides asynchronous
acquisition of images from up to two cameras –
an area or linescan camera and a FireWire
camera equipped with an IEEE-1394 port. With
built-in Ethernet connectivity and compatibility
with IP and Modbus protocols, the vision engine
is said to be easy to integrate into an existing
factory network. According to the firm, the DIN
rail-mounting kit and rugged enclosure make
the NetSight II DCL extremely robust in
industrial environments.
www.firstsightvision.co.uk
Optical profiler
Veeco
Veeco has introduced a
high-performance
optical profiler to
address metrology
challenges in the
rapidly growing printed
electronics industry. This sector includes
organic LEDs, radiofrequency identification
tags, biosensors and other flexible circuitry.
According to the firm, its new profiler is able to
analyse semiconductor-on-plastic devices with
feature sizes ranging from tens to hundreds of
micrometres. The Wyko NT4800 allegedly
combines high-speed, high-resolution optical
profiling with large format staging to determine
surface shape and texture. Using interferometry,
the unit is able to map 3D surface features from
nanometre-scale roughness through to 2 mm
step heights. The NT4800 includes vision
software that provides the user with over 200
analysis tools and data-logging for realtime
feedback and statistical process control.
www.veeco.com
Laser diode module
Photonic Products Ltd
UK laser diode
specialist Photonics
Products has added a
405 nm (blue-violet)
laser diode to its range
of Photon Laser
modules. Versions
emitting either a 4 mW
elliptically shaped
(4 × 1.5 mm) beam, or
0.9 mW circular (2 mmdiameter)
beam are available. The lasers are
supplied in a cylindrical aluminium housing
containing the drive circuitry and a lens. An
optional 25 mm mounting flange can be
supplied on request. The glass antireflectioncoated
optical lens may be adjusted to give a
focused spot or a collimated beam. Powered by
6.5–12 V DC, the laser operates over a –10 to
50 °C range and features a TTL input for
modulating the laser up to 1 kHz.
www.photonic-products.com
Low-profile LED
LEDtronics
Low-profile, surfacemount
LEDs from US
firm LEDtronics are
available with a tiny
footprint measuring
2.4 × 3.3 mm. Dubbed
SML070, the devices
suit densely packed
printed circuit boards and are available in
single- or bi-colour versions. The yellow
(590 nm), green (570 nm) and red (620 nm)
single-colour versions all have clear lenses,
whereas the bi-colour green/red devices are
supplied with a milky-white lens. Luminous
intensities range from 1.2 to 2.3 mcd at 20 mA
current, according to the colour.
www.ledtronics.com
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
37

Laser Solutions
Need top-class wall-plug
efficiency, low noise and
compact size?
Cobolt Samba
532 nm, 100 mW
Single longitudinal mode DPSSL
Excellent beam quality M2

long integration readings.
www.avantes.com
PRODUCTS
Solutions
in Optics.
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
Beam-profiler software
Photon Inc
Beam-profiling expert
Photon Inc has
developed an ActiveX
server interface for its
NanoScan product.
Featuring the US firm’s
scanning-slit
technology, NanoScan measures beam size and
position with sub-micrometre resolution. The
ActiveX interface, which allows Windows
programs to communicate and share data with
each other, should make it easier for users to
develop custom test routines and integrate
beam-profile data with software.
www.photon-inc.com
Nd:YAG laser
Continuum
Continuum, a US
provider of flashlamppumped
solid-state
Nd:YAG lasers, has
introduced Inlite – an
industrial Nd:YAG
product. Designed for
operation in harsh
environments, the
device features a robust structure to ensure
long-term thermal and mechanical stability,
and includes a modular power supply.
Harmonic generators that enable emission at
532, 355 and 266 nm fit directly inside the
laser head. Applications listed by the firm
include materials processing, laser-induced
breakdown spectroscopy, range finding,
particle detection and remote sensing.
www.continuumlasers.com
Spectrometer
Becker & Hickl
German firm Becker &
Hickl has introduced a
multi-spectral lifetime
detector module called
PML-Spec. The device
features 16 simultaneous wavelength
channels, a spectral range of 300–850 nm
and a useful count-rate of more than 2 MHz.
Using the firm’s proprietary time-correlated
single photon-counting technique, light is split
into its spectrum by a polychromator and
detected by a multi-anode photomultiplier
tube. Distributed in the UK by Photonic
Solutions and in the US by Boston Electronics,
the device is said to suit applications such as
time-resolved laser scanning microscopy and
biomedical fluorescence.
www.becker-hickl.com
Performance at the
highest level calls for
experience, ability and
knowledge – and a
great deal of passion.
We are one of Europe‘s
leading experts in
We are your centre of competence
for opto-mechanical and electro-optical
systems and your reliable partner
worldwide.
BERLINER G LAS GROUP
BERLINER G LAS
precision thin-film
coated optical
components
electro-optical
assemblies
opto-mechanical
modules
complex optical
systems
individual
measurement
set-ups
Visit us at
Laser 2005 · World of Photonics
Booth # B2-406
Berliner Glas KGaA Herbert Kubatz GmbH & Co.
Phone +49 (0) 30/60 905-0
Fax +49 (0) 30/60 905-100
info@berlinerglas.de · www.berlinerglas.com
SwissOptic AG
Phone +41 71 727 3074
Fax +41 71 727 4686
swissoptic@swissoptic.com · www.swissoptic.com

PRODUCTS
LED spotlight
B&M Optik
B&M Optik of Germany
is offering a white-light
LED spotlight that
delivers constant
luminous intensity over
approximately 80% of
its diameter. The LED has an estimated lifetime of
around 50 000 h when operated at 700 mA.
Under these conditions, the luminance of the
lamp measured at a distance of 1 m and
divergence angle of 17° is equal to 420 lx, falling
to 370 lx at a divergence angle of 33°.
www.bm-optik.de
Infrared camera
Sensors Unlimited
Sensors Unlimited has
added a series of linear
digital video linescan
cameras to its range of
shortwave infrared
sensors and nearinfrared
imaging
systems. Suitable for high-resolution machine
vision and spectroscopy, the low-noise devices
are said to work with any of the firm’s standard
linear- (800–1700 nm) or extended-wavelength
(1100–2200 nm) arrays. The cameras operate
at room temperature using indium gallium
arsenide technology and feature 14-bit digital
output with continuous or triggered scanning
modes. Supplied with a 25 or 50 µm pixel pitch,
several detector array geometries are available
with pixel counts of 256, 512 or 1024.
www.sensorsinc.com
Machine vision
DVT
DVT, an expert in machine vision, is entering the
semiconductor market with the launch of its new
wafer reader. The product combines the firm’s
smart camera technology with an extensive
algorithm library from its recent acquisition of
MTI Machine Vision. By recording and analysing
images from wafers throughout their fabrication
process, the device is said to enable product
traceability and realtime validation. Integrated
lighting and optics are said to manage changes
in target appearance such as contrast and
colour. The firm plans to offer its wafer reader at
an introductory price of $4995 (73850).
www.dvtsensors.com
Infrared detector
Sofradir
Sofradir says that it has improved the
performance of its 288 × 4 infrared (IR)
detector. The French firm claims to have
extended the lifetime of its mercury cadmium
telluride-based scanning array from 3500 h to
7000 h by enhancing key components,
including the unit’s microcooler and Dewar. By
reducing thermal losses, the company has been
able to lower power consumption by 30%. The
detector suits use in devices such as hand
goggles, IR cameras and airborne thermal
imagers, where it provides enhanced
performance and reliability.
www.sofradir.com
Diode-laser system
TOPTICA Photonics
TOPTICA Photonics of Germany has updated its
iPulse and iBeam diode-laser systems. The units
have been designed with a beam diameter of
1 mm (1/e 2 ) to provide
a direct replacement for
gas lasers. Systems are
available in 375, 405,
440, 473, 640, 660
and 675 nm
wavelengths for applications such as optical
data storage, computer-to-plate printing,
microlithography and fluorescence. The iPulse
device offers digital modulation of up to 200 MHz
and analogue modulation in the kHz range.
www.toptica.com
Spectrometer
B&W Tek
The BTF112E miniature array fluorometer from
B&W Tek is a user-configurable spectrometer for
fluorescence applications in the 270–700 nm
range. The unit’s optical
collection system has
been devised to enable
high-efficiency
fluorescence detection.
User-friendly software
provides instrument
control and dataanalysis
functions. The spectrometer’s compact
mechanical design is said to aid portable
applications both in the field and in a laboratory
environment.
www.bwtek.com
Laser diode
Laserex
Australian firm Laserex
has released a robust,
sealed laser-diode
module that suits harsh
industrial environments
such as those found in
mines, crushing plants and rolling mills.
Measuring 40 × 20 × 20 mm, the compact
LDM-3 unit operates over a –10 to 40 °C
temperature range. Modules are available with
output powers ranging from 1 to 50 mW and from
635 nm up to 850 nm. The electrically isolated
40 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

device comes with a steel housing that protects
the laser source. A pulsing option of up to
100 kHz is available and all of the firm’s laser
modules come with a 12-month warranty.
www.laserex.net
Visible laser
High Power Devices
High Power Devices has
released an RS232
interfaced version of its
Model 7401 visible
laser system for OEM
applications. Model
7403 has half the
footprint of the 7401 version with full functional
control provided through a PC. Power levels of
up to 2 W are available at 635 nm or 650 nm
wavelengths, and up to 5 W at 670 nm or
690 nm. The US firm is also able to offer
custom wavelength and power options to suit
special applications. The system comes with a
one-year standard warranty.
www.hpdinc.com
Ultraviolet lens
Resolve Optics
Resolve Optics of the
UK has announced a
high-performance
60 mm focal-length
ultraviolet (UV) lens for
use with reflected-UV
imaging systems. Because the lens operates in
both UV and visible wavebands, users can
identify and focus on a target in the visible and
then, by sliding across a UV filter, capture
images in the UV without refocusing. A
telescopic focusing-mount gives the lens large
movement in a compact form. Without using
add-on adapters, the lens can image objects
from infinity to 1:1.25 magnification. The UV
lens could benefit forensic applications such as
imaging human skin damage.
www.resolveoptics.com
MEMS motion analyser
Polytec
Polytec, a specialist in
scanning vibrometers
and light-based
measurement systems,
has introduced a tool
for characterizing the 3D motion of
microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and
micro-optoelectromechanical systems. The
MSA-400 uses laser Doppler vibrometry to
characterize out-of-plane vibrations and
stroboscopic video microscopy to monitor inplane
displacements. An optional second laser
is available for measuring differential out-ofplane
vibrations between scanned and fixed
locations. Simple to set up and ready to take
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
PRODUCTS
data within minutes, the instrument is said to
be easy to integrate with probe stations for
wafer-level measurements.
www.polytec.com
Pulsed laser diode
Laser Components
Laser Components
Instrument Group can
supply pulsed laser
diodes with a peak
power of more than
210 W at 905 nm. The
devices are based on the firm’s nanostack
laser technology, which includes multiple
integrated emitters with a total aperture of
200 × 10 µm. A peak output power of at least
75 W is obtained using single emitters at a
pulse length of 100 ns, with higher powers
achieved by stacked devices. The emitting area
for the double stack is around 200 × 125 µm,
rising to 200 × 250 µm for a triple stack.
Devices can be supplied in a TO-18 package
and also as a chip on a ceramic carrier.
Applications listed by the firm include LIDAR or
telemetry at great distances.
www.lasercomponents.com
Fibre-coupled laser diode
Coherent
Coherent’s fibre array
packaged diode lasers
are now available in
940 nm and 980 nm
versions with a wallplug
efficiency of
greater than 50%. The
devices deliver 40 W of continuous-wave output
through an 800 µm fibre bundle with a
numerical aperture of less than 0.11. They are
conduction-cooled and are primarily targeted at
medical applications and fibre-laser pumping.
Medical uses include laser-enabled cardiac
surgery and, as pump lasers, the devices suit
both erbium- and ytterbium-doped fibre lasers.
www.coherent.com
Infrared camera
Thermoteknix
Thermoteknix has
launched a range of
infrared cameras
dubbed MIRICLE. The
MIRICLE 110 K cameras
are said by the firm to
achieve 44% more image resolution than
industry standard 320 × 240 detectors.
Incorporating uncooled microbolometer infrared
detectors, embedded software and a range of
exchangeable germanium lenses, units can be
configured as ultra-compact cameras or modular
infrared imaging cores for OEM applications.
www.thermoteknix.com
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PRODUCTS
Laser ablation system
New Wave Research
US firm New Wave
Research has released
an all-solid-state
193 nm laser ablation
system designed
specifically for ICP
mass spectrometer
solid-sampling analysis.
The UP193 Solid-State
features deep UV
absorption and shortpulse
length performance, and generates a
selection of 13 pre-calibrated spot sizes down to
2 µm. The system uses its proprietary laser
design and beam-conditioning optics to produce
flat, uniform craters. Applications include bulk
and microfeature analysis of metals, analysis of
biological tissues, tree rings and gels, and the
forensic analysis of plastics, ceramics, paint,
glass and quartz.
www.new-wave.com
Photometer
Optronic Laboratories
The OL 730 series of
radiometers and
photometers from USbased
Optronic Laboratories is said to provide
research-grade precision and accuracy. Using
state-of-the-art digital signal processing, the
OL 730D is capable of performing measurements
over all or part of the UV/VIS/IR spectrum and
includes a photon-counter for extremely low-lightlevel
measurement. The basic version, OL 730C,
has an internal preamplifier and a sensitivity of
1 × 10 –14 A, and model OL 730CV can be
controlled via the user’s PC.
www.olinet.com
LIBS system
Ocean Optics
The LIBS-ELITE from
Ocean Optics is a fully
integrated laserinduced
breakdown
spectrometer (LIBS)
platform that provides
realtime, highresolution
spectral analysis of elements in a
variety of materials. The system covers the
200–980 nm spectral range at 0.1 nm full-width
at half-maximum (FWHM) in a single laser pulse
and has parts-per-billion sensitivity.
Features of the product include a high-power
Nd:YAG laser emitting at 1064 nm, sample
mapping and targeting functions, precise x–y
sample positioning, laser-spot diameter control
from 20 to 1200 µm, high-resolution sample
magnification and a sample chamber with a gas
purge for increased sensitivity.
www.oceanoptics.com
Optical simulation software
Breault Research Organization
Breault Research Organization (BRO) has
released ASAP 2005 – the next generation of its
optical simulation software. Featuring more than
20 years of continuous development by the
firm’s optical engineers, software engineers and
physicists, the software functions as a virtualprototyping
tool. Product designers can use the
package to predict the real-world performance
of automotive lighting, bio-optic systems,
coherent systems, displays, imaging systems,
lightpipes, luminaries and medical devices. The
2005 version has enhanced interoperability with
other industry standard engineering software
packages. BRO’s software can be configured to
include a CAA V5 plug-in for CATIA by Dassault
Systemes, an API-based plug-in for Solidworks
by Solidworks Corp and an ASAP-specific IGES
import profile for Rhinoceros by McNeel &
Associates.
www.breault.com
Laser machining system
J P Sercel Associates
J P Sercel Associates
has introduced the IX-
3000 micromachining
system – an industrialgrade,
class 1 UV
excimer laser-based
ablation set-up for
processing a wide
range of materials. The high-throughput unit is
usually supplied with lasers operating at 248 nm
or 193 nm wavelengths, although a variety of
other sources are available on request.
Surrounded by a cleanroom enclosure, the
system features roof-mounted HEPA filtration
units. Applications listed by the firm include the
manufacture of inkjet-nozzle arrays, wafer-scale
processing, micromachining, large-area
patterning and general drilling – all with a
resolution down to 1 µm.
www.jpsalaser.com
MDT crystal
Vision Crystal Technology
Vision Crystal
Technology of Germany
produces smalldiameter
monoclinic
double tungstate (MDT)
crystals that can transform monochromatic
Gaussian beams into polarized hollow-light
cylinders. MDT is highly transmissive (T >98%)
from 350–5000 nm and suits a broad range of
laser sources. The diameter of the resulting light
cylinder depends linearly on the crystal length.
For example, a 20 mm-long crystal would
produce a hollow-light cylinder of about 0.9 mm
diameter (at 633 nm). The light cylinders
promise to be an efficient tool for trapping or
42 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

moving small particles or atoms.
www.vct-ag.de
PRODUCTS
Diode laser
Eagleyard Photonics
Eagleyard Photonics of Berlin, Germany, has
introduced a broad-area laser diode with a
200 µm strip emitting at 7 W at 808 nm. The
divergence angle of the product is 20°/10° fullwidth
at half-maximum (FWHM). The firm says
that the laser’s high brilliance, low operatingpower
and long lifetime mean it suits numerous
industrial and scientific applications, including
pumping Nd-based solid-state lasers or fibre
lasers. Eagleyard also supplies a range of laser
diodes emitting from 735 to 1120 nm with
output powers of up to 5 W.
www.eagleyard.com
OLED display
OSRAM
OSRAM Opto
Semiconductors has
expanded its range of
Pictiva polymer-based
organic LED (OLED)
displays. With a 1 inch
diagonal display size, the 96 × 36 pixel devices
are now available in the new colours of galaxywhite
and glacier-blue, for mobile phone subdisplay
applications. A 1.2 inch format having
128 × 48 pixels has been released to suit small
electronic devices such as MP3 players. To aid
product designers, the OLED display is available
in seven brilliant colours – lime green, jungle
green, light green, tiger orange, clarity orange,
scarlet red and elegance yellow. With a 160°
viewing angle, the firm says that its Pictiva
displays could also be used in portable medical
equipment and industrial devices.
www.osram-os.com
Plane-grating spectrometers
Carl Zeiss
Two plane-grating
spectrometers (PGS) for
the near-infrared
spectral region are now
available from Carl
Zeiss. The PGS1.7
covers 960–1690 nm
and features an InGaAs detector with 512 pixels
and a resolution of 5 nm. The PGS2.2 covers
1100–2200 nm and uses a 256 pixel InGaAs
detector with a resolution of 11 nm.
Both modules combine a collimator and a
focusing lens with a plane grating and are said
to offer excellent wavelength stability and
wavelength accuracy. Carl Zeiss says the
products suit layer-thickness measurements in
the semiconductor field and offer a good
price:performance ratio.
www.zeiss.de
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

PRODUCTS
Spectroradiometer
Glen Spectra
Glen Spectra is now
offering the OL756, a
portable UV-VIS
(200–800 nm)
spectroradiometer from
Optronic Laboratories.
The product features a
USB port, double
monochromator for
stray-light rejection, narrow bandwidth variable
from 1 to 5 nm and a temperature-stabilized
autoranging PMT detector spanning six decades
for high-sensitivity and dynamic range.
The product is said to be ideal for performing
solar spectral measurement over the full range
in less than 6.5 s. It also operates on 12 V DC
power for portable or remote measurements.
Input optics available for the OL756 include
cosine-corrected integrating spheres for
spectral irradiance studies and telescopes and
microscopes for spectral radiance
measurements.
www.glenspectra.co.uk
Linescan camera
DALSA
DALSA has released its
Piranha3 range of
linescan cameras. The
range includes what is
said to be the world’s
first 12K camera with a
5 µm pixel pitch. An 8K,
7 µm camera is also
available.
Specifications include data rates of 320 MHz
(8 × 40 MHz); line rates of up to 33.7 kHz (8K)
or 23.5 kHz (12K); ±50 µm sensor alignment
accuracy and flat-field correction. Complete with
a CameraLink interface, the cameras are said to
suit applications such as flat-panel and printed
circuit-board inspection, parcel sorting and highperformance
document scanning.
www.dalsa.com
Fizeau interferometer
4D Technology
The FizCam1500 is the
latest addition to
4D Technology’s
FizCam range of
dynamic Fizeau
interferometer systems.
The product uses a single camera and a highspeed
optical phase sensor, making it
insensitive to vibration and air turbulence.
According to 4D, the FizCam1500 makes full
wavefront measurements in 30 µs, offers
magnification imaging of 16× optical/digital
zoom, wavelengths from 638 nm to 1.06 µm
and aperture options from 100 to 600 nm.
44 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

PRODUCTS
Applications include optical testing in a
production environment, as well as the
measurement of moving parts such as scanner
mirrors and spinning disks.
www.4dtechnology.com
Multimode fibre
IRphotonics
IRphotonics, a Canadian supplier of mid-infrared
optical materials, has introduced a multimode
fibre dubbed XTEND-FiBER that is said to offer a
smooth transmission window from 300 to
5500 nm. The firm uses a proprietary chemical
composition and patented manufacturing
process to extend the product’s spectral range
by more than 1 µm in the mid-infrared region,
compared with other fibres.
www.irphotonics.com
Imaging spectrometer
Princeton Instruments
The MicroSpec series
of imaging
spectrometers from
Princeton Instruments
and Acton Research is
designed for microspectroscopy
applications. The
product uses a fully
reflective design that
eliminates the varying
effects of chromatic aberrations in transmissive
systems.
MicroSpec comes with a variety of
interchangeable wavelength-dispersion
modules and an entrance aperture, all of which
can be computer-controlled to allow
automated selection of spectral range and
resolution. The firms say the MicroSpec allows
UV-VIS-NIR spectroscopic studies in
applications such as fluorescence,
absorbance, transmission and scattering.
www.piacton.com
Motion controller
Newport
Newport has
introduced the
SMC100CC, a singleaxis
motion controller
for DC servo-motors of
up to 48 VDC at
1.5 A rms at a cost of
under 7600, including power supply.
The SMC100CC uses an integrated RS-232-C
interface or a USB port that requires an external
SMC-USB adapter for a Windows operating
system. Windows-based software supports all
configurations and enables basic motion.
Advanced application programming is
simplified by an ASCII command interface and
a set of two-letter mnemonic commands. Up to
31 controllers can be networked through the
internal RS-485 communication link. The
SMC100CC also features advanced “multiaxes”
commands, such as “stop all” or “start a
motion of all axes” and communicates at a
57 600 baud rate.
www.newport.com
Laser-safety eyewear
Pro-Lite Technology
Pro-Lite Technology,
UK, has added the
FlexSeal goggle to its
range of laser-safety
eyewear from GPT
Glendale. The FlexSeal
goggle is lightweight,
fits neatly over
prescription eyewear and offers a wide field of
view. It also has a soft silicone goggle body
and an adjustable headband so that the
wearer is assured of the highest level of
comfort as well as a secure fit.
Available from stock, the FlexSeal is currently
on offer with filters for protection against
Nd:YAG, CO 2 and diode lasers. Additional filters
for other wavelengths are continually being
added to the range as they complete the
EN207 certification process.
www.pro-lite.uk.com
Mid-IR OPO
Aculight
Aculight of the US has developed a fibre-laserpumped
singly resonant optical parametric
oscillator (OPO) that provides continuous tuning
in the mid-infrared wavelength range. Currently
at the prototype stage, the system has been
designed for use in absorption spectroscopy
applications such as methane gas detection.
The fibre-pumped OPO operates at room
temperature and is said to generate over 1 W of
continuously tunable output in the 2–4 µm range.
According to Aculight, this development will give
spectroscopists a tool with which to conduct a
wide variety of high-precision experiments.
www.aculight.com
FBG interrogator
FOS&S
Belgian firm FOS&S has released the
SpectralEye Interrogator 600, a hand-held
device for studying fibre Bragg gratings. Typical
applications include the monitoring of pipeline
stress, oil-well temperature and pressure, and
security fences. The SpectralEye operates
between 1527 and 1565 nm with a launch
power of 500 µW. Other features include a
wavelength accuracy of 10 pm, a resolution of
1 pm, a scan time of 1 s and a 20 dB dynamic
range. The portable devices weighs 1.3 kg and
has a battery life of 90 min.
www.fos-s.be
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
45

Microlens
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PRODUCTS
Parabolic mirror
Optical Surfaces
UK-based Optical
Surfaces, a supplier of
aspheric optical
components, can
provide high-precision,
off-axis parabolic
mirrors for a range of
applications such as high-power laser focusing.
Possibilities include off-axis parabolic mirrors
up to 600 mm in diameter with a surface
accuracy of up to λ/20 peak-to-valley,
depending upon off-axis angles. A range of
coatings from metallic, with or without a
protective overcoat, through to multilayer
dielectrics and ultra-hard coatings is available.
www.optisurf.com
Laser-diode current source
ILX Lightwave
According to ILX
Lightwave, its
LDX-3232 highcompliance
laser-diode
current source has
been developed specifically for controlling highcompliance
voltage devices such as quantumcascade
laser diodes. The unit delivers up to
4 A of low-noise current at up to 15 V with a
stability of better than 20 ppm. Features
include dual-current ranges, constant power
control, fine/coarse set-point control, laser
current and voltage measurement, forwardvoltage
adjustment and measurement, and an
external modulation input.
The current source offers a number of
protection strategies such as slow start,
adjustable current limits and compliance
voltage, intermittent contact protection and
shorting relays. In addition, the LDX-3232
accepts a TTL input that can be configured to
turn off the output to the laser if it gets too hot.
www.ilxlightwave.com
Laser-pattern generators
Micronic
Swedish company Micronic has introduced two
laser-pattern generators for photomask
production. The Omega6800 is a raster-scan
laser writer for semiconductor reticles down to
the 130 nm design node. Featuring the firm’s
latest technology, the laser writer reduces
microscopic systematic deviations in
CCD/CMOS image-sensor masks, masks for
small displays, DRAM, SRAM and other murasensitive
devices. New optics provide improved
critical-dimension linearity and clearfield/dark-field
deviation.
The firm’s second tool, dubbed Omega6080,
is configured to produce reticles down to the
250 nm design node and is said to offer a
modern, accurate and a cost-effective
alternative to legacy e-beam systems.
www.micronic.se
TEC controller
AOS Technology
AOS Technology of the
UK has launched an
OEM controller for
Peltier coolers capable
of temperature control
of ±0.005 °C. Designed
to take a temperature
sensor input from a standard NTC thermistor,
the PC1 is said to be ideal for use with many
laser-diode and SLED packages. The compact
unit measures 62 × 40 mm and provides up to
±3 A Peltier drive-current with very little heat
dissipation from the circuit. Temperature setpoint
control is provided by a combination of
two fixed-value resistors and a high-stability 13-
turn potentiometer. The PC1 also incorporates a
logic-level shutdown input and an analogue
output for monitoring TEC current.
www.aost.co.uk
Spectrometer
StellarNet
US firm StellarNet is
offering low-cost, highresolution
fibre-optic
spectrometers that
cover the wavelength
ranges 0.9–1.7 µm
and 1.5–2.2 µm.
Portable and with no
moving optical parts,
the devices connect to a PC via a USB2 or
parallel port. The unit features cooled InGaAs
detectors with a choice of 512 or 1024 pixels,
and acquires spectra in 1 ms. An optional
lithium-ion battery allows instrument operation
for up to 6 h. Supplied in a rugged housing, the
devices are said to suit portable or laboratorybased
spectroscopy applications.
www.stellarnet-inc.com
Lenses
Sill Optics
A range of telecentric
f-theta lenses for
scanning applications
is currently available
from Sill Optics of
Germany. According to
the company, the laser
beam is always
perpendicular to the working field, making the
lenses suitable for producing the high-density
interconnect boards that are used in products
such as mobile phones.
A popular lens is the S4LFT4160/075, which
has an effective focal length of 167 mm and a
usable image field-size of 60 × 60 mm. The
46 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

PRODUCTS
company also offers a range of f-theta objectives
suitable for use with wavelengths of between
193 nm and 10.6 µm.
www.silloptics.de
High speed camera
Low light level camera
Laser
Lighting
P H O T O N L I N E S
UK office: ja-marvin@photonlines.com
French office: infos@photonlines.com
www.photonlines.com
Femtosecond laser
High Q Laser
The femtoTRAIN Ti:sapphire laser from High Q
Laser emits sub-50 fs pulses at wavelengths
between 780 and 900 nm and repetition rates
of 20–120 MHz. Measuring just
530 × 200 × 75 mm, the unit houses a green
pump laser and a semiconductor-saturable
absorber mirror, creating a cost-effective
source in a sealed housing.
According to High Q, the femtoTRAIN series
offers turnkey operation as well as high spatial
and temporal stability. The laser is said to be a
perfect 800 nm source for applications requiring
reliability and stable modelocking.
www.highqlaser.at
Excimer laser
Lambda Physik
The OPTex Pro-T is the
first compact entrylevel
excimer laser to
offer high spatial and
temporal coherence,
according to its
developer Lambda
Physik. Available at 193 nm and 248 nm, the
air-cooled lasers deliver pulse energies of up to
2 mJ, a linewidth of less than 5 pm, repetition
rates of up to 200 Hz and a burst mode of up
to 500 Hz. This coherence and tunability are
said to be the result of a high-efficiency optics
module comprising a prism beam-expander
and dispersion grating. Lambda Physik says it
has designed the OPTex Pro-T for applications
such as interference lithography, remote
sensing and laser-induced fluorescence in
combustion analysis.
www.lambdaphysik.com
Video microscope
Moritex
UK-based Moritex
Europe has released a
CCD microscope
system that integrates
fibre-optic and CCD
components. The
MS804 microinspection
station
features the firm’s
proprietary honeycomb
CCD camera
technology and
includes multi-exposure
high-intensity LED
lighting. Powerful
software enables the
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
47

PRODUCTS
delivery of sharp images with 1280 × 980 pixel
resolution. The microscope is available with a
16–200× range of zoom lenses, X–Y and Z
stages and camera mounts to suit linear, angle
and area measurement.
www.moritex.com
Laser diode stack
Thales Laser Diodes
Thales Laser Diodes
has introduced a series
of devices based on
microchannel
technology that covers
the 795–980 nm
range. The high-power,
reliable diode lasers
are arranged in a stack
of up to 25 bars. A fast
axis collimation lens
reduces beam divergence to below 1°.
Operating in the kilowatt range in
continuous-wave mode, the sources are said to
suit the pumping of solid-state lasers for
commercial or defence applications.
www.thales-laser-diodes.com
Laser-marking system
Precision Technology Group
Precision Technology Group has introduced
“Fiber Tower” – a series of Q-switched fibrelaser-marking
systems that provide a safe,
state-of-the-art, low-cost alternative to Nd:YAG
lasers. Systems include a fibre laser, scan
head, PCI control-board and graphical-based
programming software. The units have a wallplug
efficiency of 20% or more, and benefits
include a low-voltage power source, small
footprint, reduced utilities and air cooling. Easy
to install, the systems are said to offer quick
start-up and simple production-line integration.
Applications listed by the firm include ITO
removal and IC chip-package marking.
www.ptgindustries.com
Ytterbium-doped fibres
Liekki
Liekki of Finland has released highly doped
ytterbium fibres based on its direct nanoparticle
deposition (DND) technology. The fibres are said
to have a significantly improved photodarkening
performance. According to Liekki, its DND fibres
show less then half of the photodarkening
degradation of conventional fibres with similar
doping density made by MCVD.
Liekki measured a significant improvement
in photodarkening in its new ytterbium fibres
with 1200 dB/metre core absorption at
976 nm. A white paper entitled
“Photodarkening: understanding and
mitigation” is available from the company and
describes the breakthrough in more detail.
www.liekki.fi
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48 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

PEOPLE
To advertise your job vacancies, contact Cadi Jones (tel: +44 (0)117 930 1090; e-mail: cadi.jones@iop.org).
UK
Failes joins Intense as
chief operations officer
Graham Failes has
joined UK
optoelectronics
specialist Intense as
its chief operations
officer. Previously a
Failes: keeping pace.
BAE Systems director
and general manager,
Failes replaces Don
McDonald, who will move back to the US and
support Intense on a consultancy basis.
UK
CDT strengthens board
with displays specialist
Cambridge Display Technology (CDT), a
developer of light-emitting polymers, has
appointed Joseph Carr to its board of
directors. Carr was formerly president and
chief executive officer of Osram Opto
Semiconductors, North America, and brings
considerable knowledge of electronic display
technologies to the UK-based company. His
responsibilities at CDT include chairing the
firm’s compensation committee.
US
Heimer heads Gamma’s
East Coast operations
Former NIST scientist
Todd Heimer is to head
Gamma Scientific’s
new East Coast office
in Massachusetts, US.
“My experience in
Heimer: technical sales.
retroreflection
measurement and
photonics overall is
ideally suited to solving our customers’ lightmeasurement
needs,” said Heimer.
US
Radiant hires Chittim to
manage growth phase
Radiant Imaging, a US expert in light and
colour measurement, has hired Kevin
Chittim as vice-president of marketing and
sales. His role includes formulating an
expansion strategy as the firm looks to grow
key market sectors such as display, lighting
and surface measurement. An industry
veteran with more than 20 years of
experience in management and business
development, Chittim has held senior
positions at Melles Griot, Newport, Spectra-
Physics and Labsphere.
SWITZERLAND
French-speaking sales
expert moves to LASAG
Swiss Nd:YAG laser
manufacturer LASAG
has appointed Michel
Normandon as its
regional sales
manager for France,
Normandon: sales focus.
Spain, Portugal,
Benelux and Frenchspeaking
parts of
Switzerland. Normandon brings 20 years of
sales and systems-engineering experience to
the firm and has previously held positions at
GSI Lumonics and MLS.
Innovation doesn’t
happen in the dark
31 July–4 August 2005
San Diego Convention Center
San Diego, California USA
Conferences • Courses • Exhibition
spie.org/events/am
Share your research in light-based technologies and
applications—and share in the 50th Anniversary of SPIE—
with engineers, scientists, managers and end-users from
over 40 countries. Plan now to participate!
Building a Better
World with Light
Tel: +1 360 676 3290 • spie@spie.org
OLE • May 2005 • optics.org
49

CALENDAR
For a more comprehensive list of events, including links to websites, visit optics.org/events.
DATE EVENT LOCATION ORGANIZER CONTACT
May 10–12 Sensor and Test 2005 Nürnberg, Germany AMA Service GmbH www.sensor-test.de/
May 11–15 International Conference on Coherent St Petersburg, Russian St Petersburg congress.phys.msu.ru/
and Nonlinear Optics (ICONO) Federation SUITMO icono-lat-2005
May 16–18 Blue 2005/Advanced LEDs in Solid- Hsinchu, Taiwan Compsemi Online, www.blue2005.com
State Lighting
Solid State Lighting Net
May 16–20 Andean Spectroscopy School Lima, Peru NCSTTI www.concytec.gob.pe/
espectroscopia/
May 22–27 SID 2005 Boston, Massachusetts Society for www.sid.org/conf/sid2005/
US Information Display sid2005.html
May 22–27 CLEO/QELS/PhAST 2005 Baltimore, Maryland, US OSA www.cleoconference.org/
May 23–27 17th International Conference on Bruges, Belgium OFS-17 Secretariat www.ofs17-bruges2005.be/
Optical Fibre Sensors
bruges2005/
June 6–7 Workshop on Building European Cambridge, UK EPIC, SPIE Europe spie.org/events/eol
OLED Infrastructure
June 7–9 Introduction to Optomechanical Design Kent, UK Sira www.sira.co.uk/courses
June 8–11 Photonics Prague 2005 Prague, Czech Republic Czech and Slovak www.photon-czsk.org
Society for Photonics
June 13–16 LASER 2005 Munich, Germany Messe München www.global-electronics.net/
id/35070/
Apollo Instruments Inc
www.apolloinstruments.com 32
Avantes BV www.avantes.com 12
Bandwidth Semiconductor LLC
www.bandwidthsemi.com 19
Berliner Glas Group www.berlinerglas.com 39
BFi OPTiLAS www.bfioptilas.com 35
Breault Research Organization www.breault.com IFC
Cobolt AB www.coboltab.se 38
CVI Laser Corporation
www.cvilaser.com/international 4
Eagleyard Photonics www.eagleyard.com 12
Edmund Industrial Optics
www.edmundoptics.com 24
EKSPLA www.eksma.com 20
ELCAN Optical Technologies
www.ELCAN.com/europe 16, 36
ESCO Products www.escoproducts.com 14
FEMTO Messtechnik GmbH www.femto.de 44
Fiberguide Industries www.fiberguide.com 48
Flexible Optical BV www.okotech.com 20
Fujian Castech Crystals Inc www.castech.com 37
ADVERTISERS’ INDEX
GPD Optoelectronics Corp www.gpd-ir.com 24
GWU Lasertechnik Vertriebs GmbH
www.gwu-group.de 7
Hamamatsu www.sales.hamamatsu.com 9
HC Photonics Corp www.hcphotonics.com 13
i-Chips www.i-chipstech.com 18
JENOPTIK Laserdiode www.jold.com 43
Lambda Research Corporation
www.lambdares.com 25
Laser Components (UK) Ltd
www.lasercomponents.co.uk 17
Laser Lines www.laserlines.co.uk 40
Leister Process Technologies www.axetris.com 46
LIMO Laser Systems www.limo.de 14
Mad City Labs Inc www.madcitylabs.com 19
Master Bond Inc www.masterbond.com 20
Melles Griot www.mellesgriot.com
OBC
Newport Corporation www.newport.com 8
nLight Photonics www.nLight.net 34
Ophir Optronics Ltd www.ophiropt.com IBC
Optics & Photonics www.spie.org/events/am 49
Optikos Corporation www.optikos.com 24
PCO AG www.pco.de 45
Photon Inc www.photon-inc.com 42
Photon Lines www.photonlines.com 47
Photonic Products www.photonic-products.com 47
Photonics West www.spie.org/events/pw 28
Quantel Big Sky 39
Sill Optics www.silloptics.de 6
SPI www.spioptics.com 30
Spiricon Power Products Inc
www.spiriconpower.com 43
Stanford Research Systems www.thinkSRS.com 10
StockerYale Inc www.stockeryale.com 14
TeraXion www.teraxion.com 19
Thales Laser Diodes
www.thales-laser-diodes.com 32
Thales Optical Coatings Ltd
www.toc-thinkagain.com 41
Trade Fair Support www.tradefair.co.uk 20
Umicore Coating Services
www.coatingservices.umicore.com 44
WAHL optoparts GmbH
www.wahl-optoparts.com 12
50 OLE • May 2005 • optics.org

With Ophir you are in
good Hands
Laser power/energy measurement you can rely on
www.ophiropt.com
Means
• Calibration at 3 NIST traceable
wavelengths, not just one
• Individual calibration of each head for
energy, not a default factor
• Linearity of power and energy checked
for each head
• Calibration of each head is checked
twice independently
• For pyroelectric heads, complete
wavelength curve, not only one
wavelength
• Detailed error with frequency
specification
Laser Measurement