The wide adoption of smartphones, high-definition content streamed on social media, the Internet of Things, data saved to the cloud, and artificial intelligence used in massive data analytics have ushered in the current era of digital economies and Industry 4.0. These applications demand high-bandwidth optical networks and digital infrastructures capable of massive data processing. As a result of these demands, there has been an emergence worldwide of hyperscale data centers and 5G access...

There has been a flurry of announcements in the news recently about low-Earth-orbit satellite constellations, which are primarily expected to be able to provide wideband internet anywhere in the world. Many of these satellite networks will require...

Legacy light sources such as halogen and metal halide produce highly collimated directional beams, but with short life and lower efficiency than LED sources. LEDs are highly efficient and long lasting, but are poor at creating beam angles below 10...

Superluminescent light-emitting diodes are broadband semiconductor devices that are closely related to their more commonly known relatives, laser diodes and light-emitting diodes. All three architectures consist of positively (p)-doped and...

A CMOS-architecture imaging array where each pixel is a photonic mixer device overcomes challenges in 3-D image capture. Gauging the distance, size and shape of an object is of paramount and self-evident practical importance in everyday life. Nature...

June 2013 through May 2014 Just a few short months ago, our January issue included a feature titled “Where the Jobs Are Now” by Howard Rudzinsky, who noted that the U.S. had experienced 44 months of continuous job growth with a comeback...

New calibration options enable significant improvements in the accuracy of new and old devices, which could mean big advances in materials for LEDs and lasers. LEDs have numerous advantages over traditional light sources such as halogen or...

Particle contamination of fluids is a huge problem in a variety of applications. Pharmaceutical products, pure water, and hydraulic and lubricating oil and fuels, for example, have strict cleanliness standards and contamination limits. In open...

Whether the application is industrial, medical, military or scientific, diagnosing a problem in your optical system can be confusing, time-consuming and costly. Beam profiling can help. There can be few frustrations greater than finding that your...

If one reviews what happened in the first 50 years of the laser’s history, it becomes quite a challenge to predict what will happen in the next 50. Lasers went from being called “a solution in search of a problem” to becoming an...

ZnO has many properties that make it attractive for optoelectronic applications. It has a bandgap of 3.37 eV – the same as gallium nitride (GaN) – and an excitation binding energy of about 60 meV. It is transparent under visible wavelengths of light...

Despite the economic downturn, laser diodes keep on pumping – sometimes literally. They often provide the pump for fiber lasers, a market segment that is still relatively strong. However, laser diodes are more than just sidekicks. They also are very...

Researchers in China have demonstrated a near-field scanning optical microscope that employs a very small aperture laser diode as the probe, rather than a tapered optical fiber with a subdiffraction-limited aperture. The approach promises to boost...

Superluminescent LEDs, also known as high-power LEDs and “laser diodes operating below threshold,” are semiconductor light sources that have a broadband output optical spectrum, like LEDs, at high power levels, like laser diodes. This combination is...

This month, we complete our report on the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Super-High Efficiency Diode Sources (SHEDS) program. In the introduction to last month’s articles, we related that, although this program was undertaken for the...

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has been tasked by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency with providing wall-plug efficiency and spectral measurements of high-power, high-efficiency laser diodes and arrays as part...

Despite their record performance, high-power fiber lasers have made little progress in penetrating the marketplace. Fiber lasers must become cost-competitive if they are to replace the existing technologies, and they must be robust and durable....

The first semiconductor lasers were produced in the laboratory in the early 1960s. Just months after their development, they were available for sale, their reliability and efficiency generating interest in the marketplace. Of course, the design and...

Apollo Instruments Inc.’s F40-xxx-1 laser diode produces 40 W with ~4-MW cm–2 sr –1 brightness. The Irvine, Calif., company says that this is a magnitude high-er than other fiber-coupled laser diodes, and that the device is compact, reliable,...

The current generation of fiber lasers offer benefits such as low cost of ownership, compact size and ease of integration, which already make them competitive with YAG lasers, especially in materials processing. As this technology and its potential...

The benefits that bar coding can bring to the medication administration process are widely recognized. Bar codes provide the most efficient method of identifying the drug, the patient, and the appropriate time and method of administration. But with...

How long is long enough for a laser diode to last? The answer essentially depends on the application. According to engineers at Newport Inc. in Irvine, Calif., telecom applications in the metro space will often work fine with lower-cost, lower-life...

Laser diodes are everywhere. But as the semiconductor laser has evolved to yield a family of robust, reliable devices, manufacturing these devices confronts the existence of multiple proprietary techniques as well as intellectual property...