Jun 7 2007
BinOptics Corporation said it has become the first manufacturer to produce a short-cavity, GaN-based, continuous-wave blue laser using etched-facet technology instead of the mechanical cleaving method currently used by the industry.
BinOptics CEO Alex Behfar said, "Our etched-facet technology allows us to manufacture devices with much shorter cavities than possible with cleaved-facets and, as a result, we are able to obtain at least three times as many blue lasers from a wafer than can be produced using the conventional cleaved-facet method." The company said that the demand for competitively priced blue lasers is growing exponentially and that its technology will enable the market for HD-DVD's, game consoles, and optical storage devices using blue lasers to grow with rising consumer demand.
"Although etched-facet technology has clearly demonstrated its value for InP-based communications in meeting the challenging performance and cost targets of telecom and datacom up to 10Gbps, these same benefits are only now being realized by BinOptics for GaN-based blue lasers," said Al Schremer, Director of GaN R&D for BinOptics. "We have made continuous-wave blue lasers with cavity lengths as short as 100µm and a threshold current as low as 10mA. Current cleaved-facet laser cavity lengths are on the order of 500 to 600µm."
BinOptics products are manufactured using a proprietary etched-facet technology, which significantly reduces the cost of production, testing, and handling compared to conventional laser processing. The technology also enables monolithic integration of multiple functions on a single chip because of its flexibility and high yield. The company's products include edge-emitting lasers with optional integrated monitoring detectors as well as the industry's first horizontal-cavity surface-emitting laser (HCSEL™). The company currently manufactures high reliability InP-based lasers operating at the 1310nm, 1490, and 1550nm wavelengths and operating up to 10Gbps.