26 January 2011

Soraa demos record 4W blue laser diode

Soraa Inc of Fremont, CA, USA (formerly Kaai Inc), which is commercializing green and blue laser diodes (LDs), has demonstrated 4 watt blue laser diodes operating at a wavelength of 450nm, claimed to be the highest-power blue laser reported from a monolithic chip.

The devices are designed to enable >500 lumen bulb-free projection displays with dramatically reduced size, weight and power consumption compared with conventional bulb-based projectors used in venues such as boardrooms, education, home theater and cinema. The firm presented its latest results at this week’s SPIE Photonics West 2011 conference in San Francisco.

Soraa also presented results of 750mW single-mode blue laser diodes (the highest single-mode power reported to date). The lasers operate with single spatial mode and multi spectral mode and are designed for smaller-format display applications such as micro projectors and pico projectors. The devices can be directly modulated at the high speeds required for high-resolution displays with minimal speckle.

Soraa’s laser diodes are designed to be compatible with all available display generating technologies including LCOS, scanning MEMS mirrors, DLP, and other diffractive approaches. The blue LD devices complement Soraa’s green laser diodes (announced in January).

Soraa was founded in 2008 (as parent company to Kaai Inc) by University of California Santa Barbara (UCSB) professors Shuji Nakamura, Steve DenBaars, and Jim Speck. The management team is led by former Intel and Samsung executive Eric Kim, and consists of commercial laser industry veterans. Soraa is funded by Khosla Ventures and NEA, and operates vertically integrated fabrication facilities in Silicon Valley and Santa Barbara.

The firm’s laser diodes are based on indium gallium nitride (InGaN) technology and are fabricated on non-polar and semi-polar GaN substrates. The firm says that its direct-diode green and blue lasers offer improvements in performance, size, weight and cost over conventional gas or solid-state lasers for consumer projection displays, defense pointers and illuminators, biomedical instrumentation and therapeutics, and industrial imaging applications.

See related items:

Soraa demos green lasers for >20lm pico projectors with minimal speckle

Tags: Soraa Blue laser diodes InGaN GaN substrates

Visit: www.soraa.com