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Coherent Corp., a leading company in the high-power semiconductor laser industry, has announced the addition of two new laser products to its portfolio. The new products will be showcased at the Photonics West exhibition in San Francisco.

The first of the new products is the Monaco infrared industrial femtosecond laser configuration, which boasts an impressive 150 W of output power. This laser is specifically designed for cutting large OLED display glass and is expected to be a game-changer in the industry. The second product is a next-generation pump laser diode that achieves an industry-record high output power of 50 W from a single chip. This breakthrough technology is expected to be widely used in a variety of applications, including fiber-optic communication systems and industrial processing.

New Monaco infrared industrial femtosecond laser

The migration of OLED screens to IT devices, such as tablets and laptops, is accelerating the demand for laser tools with higher output power that can process larger glass sheets than those currently used in smartphones. The new Monaco 1035-150-150 outputs more than double the power and pulse energy of existing configurations, enabling high-precision cutting of large glass panels in very high volumes to produce large OLED screens with perfect assembly fit in next-generation IT devices.

“Our new Monaco 150 is the smallest femtosecond laser of its kind on the market and the easiest to integrate into laser tools,” said Allan Ashmead, Senior Vice President, Micro-Electronics & Instrumentation, North America. “It’s the latest edition of our highly successful Monaco platform, a field-proven workhorse with more than 750 systems installed throughout factories worldwide that operate around the clock, seven days a week, mass producing OLED displays for smartphones as well as medical devices.”

The Monaco 1035-150-150 can deliver energy pulses of 150 µJ at rate of 1 MHz with a pulse width of less than 400 fs. It includes all the standard functionality of the Monaco platform, including pulse on demand, variable pulse width tuning, variable repetition rate, and seeder burst mode. The laser is ideal for cutting OLED display glass, sapphire, and complex-coated brittle materials with thicknesses of up to 2 mm.

Coherent offers a broad portfolio of lasers for state-of-the-art OLED display manufacturing, including backplane laser annealing, cutting and drilling notches and holes for sensors, and detaching flexible or foldable displays from their rigid carriers.

Industry’s First Commercially Available 50 W Pump Laser Diodes

The deployment of fiber lasers for materials processing applications such as cutting, welding, marking, and additive manufacturing is accelerating, driving the demand for key components that lower the cost per watt of output power. The new laser diodes from Coherent achieve 50 W of output power, 40% more than that of the existing product, enabling high-power industrial fiber laser designs with fewer pump laser diodes.

“We believe that this is the first commercially available pump laser diode in the industry to achieve 50 W of output power,” said Dr. Karlheinz Gulden, Senior Vice President, Laser Components and Subsystems Business Unit. “We continue to break new industry records in semiconductor laser diode output power, based on our gallium arsenide technology platform that has decades of field-proven reliability. These are strong differentiators that continue to accelerate our market leadership.”

The new 50 W laser diodes are available at 915 nm and 976 nm. The output facet width of the laser chips is available from 150 µm to 350 µm, enabling optimal coupling efficiency and output powers for a wide range of fiber laser designs. The chips include Coherent’s proprietary E2 front mirror passivation that prevents catastrophic damage to the laser, even at extremely high output powers.

Coherent offers pump laser diodes as bare dies, chips on ceramic submounts, and in fiber-coupled multi-emitter modules. Coherent’s broad portfolio of components for fiber lasers includes seed lasers, acousto-optic modulators, fiber Bragg gratings, kilowatt pump and signal combiners, as well as IBS-coated laser optics and micro-optics for high-power isolators.

Coherent will showcase its differentiated laser solutions at Photonics West in San Francisco from Jan 28 to Feb 2.

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