A number of laser companies are here at SID, but so far I have only had time to visit one of them, QPC Lasers (Sylmar, CA: www.qpclasers.com). I had known about them before I came, of course, and planned my trip so I could visit their facility in Sylmar on Monday before going into Los Angeles for SID. Their company is a new building built to their design about 10 miles north of beautiful downtown Burbank.

Matt Brennesholtz
Insight Media Analyst

In this building QPC can do the complete soup-to-nuts of laser research, development and manufacturing, from the growth of the wafers in their MOCVD machine to packaging. According to Jeff Unger, President, co-founder and general technical guru, having everything under one roof speeds and simplifies the R&D process. The building has enough capacity to carry them to consumer electronics volumes of lasers, although for those volumes the packaging operation will be moved off-shore.

The QPC forte is high-powered lasers. Currently they make a 300W IR laser and they are aiming for 500W soon. 3 or 6 watt lasers for projection systems would be nothing new. Their technology allows them to get high powers out of single-emitter lasers. This high power density allows simple and efficient single-pass frequency doubling with PPLN crystals. They frequency double for blue and green and make their own 640nm red direct emission lasers. Currently they are working on three series of lasers for projectors, for front projectors, pocket projectors and pico-projectors.

The module that is furthest along in development is the pocket projector module with 600mW red, 400 mW green and 400mW blue output. The current package for this module is 35×45x10mm, but ultimately it will be 25×25x7. The front projector module will have 6W, 3W and 3W for red, green and blue respectively and the pico-projector module will be 200mW, 100mW and 100mW for the three colors. While the packages aren’t ready for these two other modules, Unger said the pico-projector module will fit inside a cell phone. Each laser in a module is designed to run at roughly a 33% duty cycle for color sequential system operation.

Unger gave me a guided tour of the building–nice. Unfortunately, they didn’t have any demos to show me, not surprising since this was the day before SID.

Tuesday I got a tour of their SID meeting room. Here they had a 1080p rear projection system with beam shaping and despeckleing from SBG Labs in San Jose. The system used their pocket projector laser module so it was actually pretty dim. According to Unger, the system had been put together for them by Jonathan Waldern at SBG Labs in just a day and a half. Considering its limitations, the system looked surprisingly good.

Tuesday at SID I also had a chance to visit the Dyoptyka meeting room. I wrote about their despeckleing technology in the May issue of Large Display Report and don’t plan on repeating that here. I did get to see the system in operation, plus I got a good explanation of how it works, which unfortunately I can’t repeat. I can say it is amazingly simple and should be very low cost in high-volume production. The SBG system is also simple, but it isn’t quite as simple as the Dyoptyka technology and is unlikely to be quite as low a cost even in mass production. On the other hand, the SBG module did more than despeckle, it also shaped and integrated the laser beam to match the microdisplay. Time will tell if one of these systems or some other system will prevail in the despeckleing business.

I also got to the Fraunhofer IPMS booth in the German pavilion and saw their monochrome projection module. This was based on a single scanning mirror with electrostatic drive. Dr. Scholles of Fraunhofer reports this device has replaced the magnetic-drive scanning mirror in Microvision devices.

Today (Wednesday) and Thursday I expect to get to the booths for Microvision, Corning, Osram and all the other laser-related companies at SID. Look for a complete review of all this laser technology in the June issue of Large Display Report.

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