Path to mass-produced, low-cost lasers opened

Abstract

Scientists at IBM's Zurich Research Laboratory in Switzerland have developed technology making it possible to fabricate up to 20,000 diode lasers on a 5-cm diameter semiconductor wafer. is the first time, IBM says, that it's been possible both to mass-produce and to test the socalled semiconductor lasers on a complete wafer. For the electronics industry, this achievement could lead to mass-produced, low-cost lasers for compact disc players, laser printers, magnetooptic read-write data storage discs, and fiber-optic data transmission systems. For chemists, it could lower the cost of powerful absorption- and fluorescence-based detectors for academic, industrial, and clinical diagnostic instruments, which also could incorporate fiber optics. This is super-significant, physical chemistry professor Richard N. Zare of Stanford University tells C&EN. The ability to make diode lasers much the way one makes chips offers the possibility of a revolutionary reduction in the price of lasers. And although thes...