Close

Search

Search Menu
Photonics Media Photonics Marketplace Photonics Spectra BioPhotonics Vision Spectra Photonics Showcase Photonics ProdSpec Photonics Handbook
Photonics Media
ABOUT US
BOOKSTORE
SUBSCRIBE
ADVERTISE
Photonics Spectra: March 2009

Photonics Spectra
 March 2009


SUBSCRIBE
FEATURES
New Solutions for working with Solutions When creating a new technology – or tweaking an old one – you always end up starting from the bottom and working your way up. No, not your position in the company, the basic nature of the materials with which you are working. It doesn’t matter whether you are looking to make a high-efficiency solar collector, artificial neurons or a better mousetrap, you must have as complete an understanding...
For microscopes, a new way is at hand Sometimes a picture is worth more than a thousand words – or a thousand dollars. That’s the case for CGI, a company based in Eden Prairie, Minn., which sells proprietary inspection systems for small,...
Looking to attract venture capital? If you want venture capital this year, it would be wise to consider going into clean technology. “The area that is growing most is clean technology, which includes alternative energies like solar,...
Heat & Motion Duke It Out The dominant cause of error in most motion applications is temperature or, more precisely, temperature change. Temperature alone affects the accuracy of any position measurement, and this error –...
Optical Fiber Market According to the FttH Fact Book 2009 by BuddeComm and Chiltern, more than 40 million people worldwide currently subscribe to fiber optic networks including FttH, or fiber to the home. Although DSL...
EDITORIAL
Careful with that eradication This is what can happen when you mess with Mother Nature. In 1985, Australian scientists developed a program to kill off non-native cats on the island of Macquarie, a United Nations World Heritage site, because the felines were preying on native burrowing birds (see the February 2009 Journal of Applied Ecology online). Freed from the predators, the island’s rabbits, also non-native, bred as...
TECH PULSE
Protecting aircraft with photonics technology Shoulder-fired missiles, or man-portable air defense systems (MANPADS), have been used by terrorists, criminals and other nonstate actors to take down civilian aircraft. In 2003, the US Department...
Night-vision goggles no longer just for military Pilots flying aircraft at night and during low-light conditions know how difficult it can be to perform flight operations when visibility is limited. Not seeing clearly can seriously affect what...
Controlling a computer with a gesture A very simple principle is at the heart of Dr. Manolya Kavakli’s high-tech computer interfacing technologies: Less is more. Kavakli, founder of the Virtual and Interactive Simulations of Reality...
Product reviews in the palm of your hand With so many options to choose from, how do you pick the best digital camera? You could close your eyes and point, ask your friends for recommendations, or stand there in the store while the...
Industrial lasers shine at Photonics West According to Tesko Laser, a company in the Chicagoland area that provides laser cutting and metal fabricating services, industrial lasers can slice through the hardest materials and make the most...
Next-Gen researcher The life of the stereotypical 14-year-old girl revolves around friends, fashion and boys. However, Zainab Al-Firdaus is anything but typical. A sophomore at Perrysburg High School in Ohio, she is a...
Teleporting a step closer to quantum computing It’s not “Star Trek,” but it does seem like science fiction. Researchers from the Joint Quantum Institute at the University of Maryland have for the first time teleported information from one atom to...
An underground fiber optic fence Tunneling to circumvent borders could be a thing of the past, thanks to a fiber optic-based technique developed here. Researchers Dr. Assaf Klar and Dr. Raphael Linker of Technion, the Israel...
LIGHT SPEED
Before Newton, there was Alhazen A millennium ago, an Arab scientist authored more than 100 works on optics, astronomy, mathematics and religious philosophy. Although he was arguably one of the greatest scientists of all time, his...
Flat panel displays: Green expectations By 2012, 70 percent of flat panel display shipments are expected to feature environmentally friendly characteristics, up from 20 percent in 2008, and by 2014, “green” shipments will dominate the...
Expansion seen for UV LED market Considering the strong potential of the UVA LED business in UV curing, augmented by the growing market demand for UVC LEDs in air and water purification, Yole Développement of Lyon, France, forecasts...
Searching for a smoother ride Potholes had better watch out. Their days of delivering jarring jolts to cars could be shortened if sensor technology being developed under a grant to Northeastern University pans out. The goal is to...
Semiconductor Certification Presto Engineering Inc. of San Jose, Calif., a provider of product engineering services to the semiconductor industry, has received ISO 9001 certification.
Failure Analysis Viking Automation Tools LLC of Santa Clara, Calif., a manufacturing and engineering design company, has signed an agreement with Nippon Scientific Co. Ltd. of Tokyo. The contract gives the American...
Camera Distribution Chelmsford, UK-based e2v has announced an agreement with Physimetrics Inc. of Roswell, Ga., enabling the latter to distribute the British company’s line-scan cameras throughout the US....
Faster Fruit Labeling Intense Ltd. of Glasgow, UK, and Sinclair Systems International of Fresno, Calif., are working together to develop a fully integrated module that will incorporate a laser diode array for use in...
Semiconductor Distributor Dilas of Mainz, Germany, has selected a distributor for its semiconductor laser components and modules. ES Technology Ltd., based in Abingdon, UK, will provide sales and support for the devices...
Fiber License An agreement has been signed by Imra America Inc. of Ann Arbor, Mich., and Teem Photonics SA of Meylan, France, regarding the American company’s fiber technology as it relates to the French...
Record Efficiency Scientists at the University of Florida in Gainesville have achieved a peak efficiency of 50 lm/W with their blue organic LEDs. The device is a step toward the researchers’ goal of producing...
E-Paper Displays Nemoptic, an e-paper company based in Magny les Hameaux, France, and Seiko Instruments Inc. of Chiba, Japan, have entered into a licensing agreement for Nemoptic’s bistable BiNem technology....
Nano Solar Cells Kopin Corp. of Taunton, Mass., has received a contract from NASA worth $600,000. The two-year project will attempt to produce a more efficient nanostructured solar cell composed of indium gallium...
Software Company Purchased Hexagon Metrology of London has acquired Technodigit SARL of Lyon, France, a developer of 3-D software. The latter company’s products will be used to enhance its purchaser’s 3-D point...
Moving to Cologne Koheras GmbH of Birkerød, Denmark, a manufacturer of white light fiber lasers, has announced the relocation of its German headquarters from Kleinostheim to Cologne. The move was completed in...
Partnership for PCM An agreement to cooperate on the qualification of atomic vapor deposition process technology for scaling phase change memory (PCM) products has been signed by Aixtron AG of Aachen, Germany, and...
GREENLIGHT
Light pollution: the good, the bad and the just-too-bright Four hundred years ago, Galileo made his first astronomical observation through a telescope. Today he wouldn’t recognize the skies because light pollution prevents us from seeing the stars clearly...
Looking for light in all the wrong places Creatures in the wild that follow natural light cues to negotiate their environment are sometimes misguided by man-made polarized light sources, such as asphalt roads, oil spills, black gravestones,...
Greening the Great White Way Broadway, long known for its egregious use of lights, launched the “Broadway Goes Green” initiative in November. Significant progress has been made by its 39 theaters, all of which are doing their...
Environmental signage: the great oxymoron As ad budgets are cut, what better way to broadcast a message than to install a large flat panel display where it will reach a captive audience? These advertisements are popping up in railway...
SLICES FROM THE BREADBOARD
Beware patent trolls These trolls may not be the characters you read about in fairy tales, but their intentions are nevertheless familiar as they seek out vulnerable companies or inventors for patents or pursue multiple...
3M, EV Group Settle Patent Infringement Suit 3M of St. Paul, Minn., a product research and development company, and EV Group of St. Florian, Austria, a wafer-processing solutions provider, have agreed to settle patent infringement litigation...
Surface-Mountable LED Chip Patented Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Bridgelux Inc., an LED technology supplier, has been awarded a US patent for its surface-mountable chip design. By eliminating the need for traditional LED packaging, this...
Crimson Trace, LaserMax Patent Infringement In Oregon, Crimson Trace Corp. Inc. of Wilsonville, a handgun laser sighting systems manufacturer, has filed a suit in US District Court in Portland against LaserMax Inc. of Rochester, N.Y., for its...
LIGHTER SIDE
Pretty in optical fibers Attention, contemporary Cinderellas: Lighting up the dance floor may no longer be merely a figure of speech. LumiGram SRL, an haute couture design and manufacturing company based in Paris, makes special-occasion clothing from woven optical fibers that literally glow in the dark. The synthetic strands are lit along their entire length by an LED module powered by a battery pack. (The material...
PRODUCTS
COMPACT REMOTE-HEAD CAMERA JAI Inc. has extended its C3 Camera Suite with the introduction of a 0.3-megapixel industrial camera with a remote-head lens and a Power-over-Camera-Link digital interface. The CM-030PMCL-RH is based on a 1/3-in. Sony monochrome progressive-scan CCD with 656 × 494 active pixels at 8- or 10-bit depth. The remote-head configuration enables operation at 120 fps, and higher rates can be achieved with...
JAI Inc.
Request info >
FIXED-FOCAL-LENGTH LENSES Edmund Optics Inc. has introduced TechSpec, compact fixed-focal-length lenses for use in industrial machine vision applications. The lenses have a broadband antireflection coating for increased...
Edmund Optics Inc.
Request info >
DIGITAL VIDEO CAMERA Photron Inc. has released the Fastcam SA5, a digital video camera that operates at 7500 fps with 1024 × 1000-pixel resolution. Available with a 12-bit monochrome or 36-bit RGB color sensor, it...
Photron USA Inc.
Request info >
FIBER OPTIC ROTARY ENCODER Unveiled by Micronor Inc., the MR316ZapFree fiber optic rotary encoder is designed for heavy-duty industrial motor drive applications that require electromagnetic interference immunity, Atex...
Micronor Sensors Inc.
Request info >
PIEZO LINEAR ACTUATORS/MANIPULATORS The N-380/N-381 Nexact ceramic linear motor actuators from PI (Physik Instrumente) LP are for use in micro- and nanomanipulation, nanotechnology, microscopy and optics, laser tuning, semiconductor...
PI (Physik Instrumente) LP, Motion Control, Air Bearings, Piezo Mechanics
Request info >
NANOPOSITIONING PIEZO STAGES For microscopy, imaging, lithography, interferometry, surface profilometry, laser tuning and beam steering applications, Newport Corp. has announced a line of nanopositioning piezo stages. The NPX...
MKS/Newport
Request info >
OPEN FRAME DIODE Lumics GmbH has introduced the U-mount, an open-frame laser diode that operates in continuous-wave mode with 9 W of output power at 808 nm and 16 W of output power at 980 nm. In pulsed mode, it...
Lumics GmbH
Request info >
LASER CUTTING SYSTEM Titan, a 10-kW fiber laser cutting system from Laser Photonics LLC, is supplied with a 1.2 × 2.4-, a 1.5 × 3.0- or a 2 × 4-m manual single-pallet shuttle system, a PC/NC base control with a...
Laser Photonics Corp.
Request info >
STRAIN ANALYZER The DiTest Sta-R from Omnisens is a strain analyzer used for quality control, testing and troubleshooting in optical fiber and cable manufacturing, and for telecommunications, defense and...
Omnisens SA
Request info >
HIGH-SPEED LENSES Westech Optical Corp. has released its 6-mm f/0.8 high-speed lenses for CCD cameras. Designed for a 1/3-in. format, the lenses offer distortion of less than 5 percent and a fixed iris. The C-mount,...
Westech Optical Corporation
Request info >
INTERFEROMETER QED Technologies has unveiled its aspheric stitching interferometer, which measures steep aspheres with as much as 1000 waves (more than 600 μm) of departure from the best-fit sphere, without...
QED Technologies Inc.
Request info >
WAFER ANALYZER PANalytical has launched the 2830 ZT, a wafer analyzer that performs simultaneous noncontact determination of layer thickness and composition on wafers up to 300 mm. The wavelength dispersive x-ray...
Malvern Panalytical Inc.
Request info >
LASER MIRRORS Saint-Gobain Crystals has unveiled two laser beam delivery mirrors. The Alpine Research Optics brand B-Max mirrors support Ti:sapphire lasers with pulse widths of ≤10 fs and deliver >99.8%...
Alpine Research Optics
Request info >
STEREO CAMERA The smart stereo camera from Vision Components GmbH is a single-board OEM device measuring 2.4 × 4 in. Its two camera heads, which can be installed at various distances and tilt angles, have CCD...
Vision Components GmbH
Request info >
PUMPING STATION Applications for Pfeiffer Vacuum GmbH’s HiCube turbo pumping station include vacuum process technology, analysis and surface physics, and electron beam welding. The plug-and-play system has both a...
Pfeiffer Vacuum GmbH
Request info >
DIODE LASER Alfalight Inc. has introduced an 808-nm, 0.65-W single-emitter pump diode laser, packaged on a 3-mm Q-mount. An integrated grating on the laser chip provides a pump wavelength locked on the...
Alfalight Inc.
Request info >
LED CONTROLLER The AS3693B LED controller integrated circuit from austriamicrosystems AG manages 16 LED channels, each with a current accuracy of 0.5%, enabling high color and brightness control. Three free...
ams OSRAM
Request info >
PHOTONICS SPECTRA 2009
back to top
Facebook Twitter Instagram LinkedIn YouTube RSS
©2023 Photonics Media, 100 West St., Pittsfield, MA, 01201 USA, [email protected]

Photonics Media, Laurin Publishing
x Subscribe to Photonics Spectra magazine - FREE!
We use cookies to improve user experience and analyze our website traffic as stated in our Privacy Policy. By using this website, you agree to the use of cookies unless you have disabled them.