A violet laser delivers high power in a small package, reduces heat, and lasts longer, helping build compact imaging, resin-curing, and medical devices.
If you are building laser direct imaging tools, resin-curing equipment, and new medical devices you might need a light source that is both compact and high powered. The shift from mercury lamps to 402 nm semiconductor lasers helps, but it brings a major challenge. As output power increases, heat rises, and the system must add larger heat-dissipation structures. This clashes with strict limits on package size, making it difficult to design space-efficient optical systems with long operating life.
Nuvoton’s violet laser diode is developed to solve exactly this conflict. It delivers 1.7 W optical output, about 40% higher than the company’s earlier products, yet it stays inside the standard TO-56 CAN package. This directly helps designers who need strong light intensity in products where space is tight and long-term reliability is critical.
The key technical barriers are heat and optical degradation. Higher-power lasers inside small packages typically fail sooner because internal heat builds up and the optical facet cannot withstand strong light over time. To address this, the company claims to redesign the chip structure to reduce optical loss, cutting down the amount of heat generated inside the device. The company also introduced a new optical-facet structure that can handle high-intensity laser light without early wear.
These changes come from more than 40 years of experience in chip design and thermal management. By lowering heat generation at the chip level, the company avoids the need for larger external cooling parts. This makes it possible to combine small size, high output, and long operating life, a combination that was previously difficult to achieve in this package class.
The result is a compact, long-life light source that supports both existing uses, like replacing the h-line of mercury lamps in industrial tools, and future applications that were not feasible with older light sources. This diode also expands Nuvoton’s lineup of mercury-lamp-replacement lasers, giving customers more options to match their specific installation requirements, performance goals, and system constraints.
