Our new report: the time for mid-IR lasers has finally come

The time for mid-infrared lasers has finally come. Never mind that CO2 and certain mid-IR solid-state lasers have been around for years. But change is coming, with new solutions, new applications, and new companies.

We finally completed our masterwork on the subject, our market report on mid-IR lasers. We found that the new applications should grow 30% per year in coming years. What's exciting is that some new military applications are helping to develop new technologies while other applications in sensing can get some traction. And, there are new solutions in quantum cascade and interband cascade lasers, GaSb diode lasers and OPSLs, fiber lasers, solid-state lasers, and compact OPOs. Not to mention help from other innovations, like QEPAs, uncooled focal plane arrays, and hollow-core optical fibers.

Altogether, we counted over 50 companies selling lasers or OPOs and OPAs in the mid-IR range. Over half are headquartered in North America.

Of course it's not easy. Some applications are very challenging, and unraveling the technologies and the applications is messy. Not to brag, but we did a nice job in the report to unravel it all for you.

There's more going on with mid-IR market information. We worked with Robert Thornton of Ubiquilight in his survey of mid-IR laser needs. Please do the survey.

And, there will be a panel discussing the mid-IR market at the Laser Focus World Marketplace Seminar in January. To make it a little more direct, we're calling it "Quantum Cascade Lasers for Mid-IR Applications: Pro vs. Con." We will have Tim Day (Daylight Solutions), Robert Afzal (Lockheed Martin), Ken Kaufmann (Hamamatsu Photonics), Lars Hildebrandt (nanoplus), and me. The agenda will up shortly, if it isn't already. We hope to see you there.

Image sensor market enters a more cyclic phase

It took the recession of 2009 to do it, but the image sensor market will finally take a dip after many years of steep growth. And, not only has the market contracted for the first time since we first started tracking image sensors in 1996, but a rockier period waits ahead.

Image sensors have a long history, dating back to fax machines and video cameras, but the recent steep run is largely thanks to the cameraphone. The cameraphone provided a convergence of factors that drove revenues to steep double-digit levels: a simultaneous swelling of handset sales worldwide, growing adoption of cameras in handsets, and rapid migration toward greater pixel counts in those cameras.

Now handset sales are taking a breather, dropping an expected 10% in unit sales this year. Other segments are also seeing declines, of course, and unit prices for the image sensors are relentlessly competitive.

The figure shows the long steep ride on a log scale, from our new report. The log scale makes it easy to see the change in growth rate (a chart with a linear scale is in our press release). What's remarkable, perhaps, is that the market decline this year won't be more severe than it is already.

We still expect single- and low double-digit growth in the recovery, and there are still many new opportunities for growth in unit sales beyond that. The two most notable are automotive and webcams. But, it gets more and more difficult to drive revenues up when it’s already near the $7 billion mark. Without the fortuitous convergence of rising cameraphone sales to drive the market forward, cycles will become more prominent.

By the way, it's not that the suppliers have had an easy time of it up to now. (Sound familiar, anyone?) But that will be a topic in a later blog.

InterSolar, PW, and gadgets are in; big Semicon West tools are out

SEMI's still newish InterSolar show outshined it's collocated Semicon West show this week, and that may be a sign of the future. InterSolar now has 3 floors of Moscone West, has all layers of the supply chain represented, and was simply more exuberant. The building has big windows. It feels more open. The solar industry this year is down, too, and there are still fewer vendors than at Semicon, but it just seemed brighter at the InterSolar show.

In contrast, Semicon is underground at Moscone North and South. It was cheerful enough, considering the downturn and the lack of windows, but the party was at the solar show. And judging from the signup map for next year, the North and South Halls will be even emptier. In fact, Photonics West is now clearly bigger than Semicon West--at least in exhibitors and floor space, and maybe attendees too. (Rumors that Semicon will be squeezed into the South Hall turned out to be false. They are putting all the wafer processing booths in the South Hall. The North Hall will have everything else.)

To be fair, no one was expecting Semicon West to be much of a party this year. After all, SEMI just announced that tool sales will drop 50% this year to the unspeakable low of $14 billion. (It was $43 billion in 2007.) But it's notable who is showing there nowadays, or rather who isn't. Semicon is a tool show, but Applied Materials, KLA Tencor, LAM Research, ASML, and many other major toolmakers don't have conventional booths anymore. For example, Applied and KLA only had meeting rooms at Semicon, while they showed their solar tools across the street at InterSolar.

Semicon West is now really about the gadgets that the major vendors attach to their systems, the materials they use, and R&D lab equipment. This means that there are suppliers for everything from microscopes and instruments to encoders and bearings. It's a good show for this kind of product development and lab stuff, and some of the specialty tools that are used in North America.

But this year, even that was down. In lasers, Cymer, Gigaphoton, Coherent, and JDS Uniphase--each one catering to the semiconductor industry--all didn't show. The laser companies that I saw were Deep Photonics, Eolite, DPSS Lasers, Innolas, Jenoptik, Quantronix, and Rofin-Baasel. IPG and Newport showed their lasers at InterSolar.

SEMICON is still the biggest fab tool show of the year for North America, and a very important one. One instrument vendor told me that even in a year like this they expected to get some sales from leads at SEMICON. New tool development still goes on. But it's a shadow of its glory days, about 15 to 20 years ago. The SEMICON shows in Asia are much weightier on the big tool side. And that makes sense, since as much as 75% of the world market for semi tools is in Asia, according to SEMI.

And, the industry has grown so big that there are other, more specialized shows to choose from. Like, for examplek, the lithography people like the SPIE Advanced Lithography meeting held in San Jose. There are meetings like this for every sort of nuance you can think of.

Photonics West is also a gadget show aimed at product developers and lab workers, like Semicon, but it spans more industries, particularly healthier ones, like biomedical and security. And it has a cross-cutting technical conference too. (And don't forget the Laser Focus World Marketplace Seminar, collocated with Photonics West every year!)

I think it's a sign of the times. Solar is in. Photonic gadgets are in. Semi tool gadgets are still in. But the days of the big tool show in North America may be over.

A new photonics application long overdue

I've been hearing for years that there's a big future for breathalysers and saliva testers. It's a huge medical opportunity that the field has only begun to explore. So the new TB Breathalyser from Rapid Biosensor Systems (RBS) is just the thing I've been waiting for.

The medical diagnostics field is one in great need for improvement. Tests are slow, expensive, and often inaccurate. A classic example is the 100 year old Mantoux test for tuberculosis. After a few days, if the test produces swelling greater than so many millimeters, it's a positive. Less, and it's a negative. It was satisfactory a century ago when TB was rampant. Today though, the false positives can exceed the true positives. And, the results vary with all sorts of factors.

I know all this because I was a false positive about 15 years ago. I did some research and found out that the test is almost worthless, and one of my doctors later admitted so much to me. But they still preferred to rely on it, maybe just because it was the "standard" test.

RBS has a breakthrough that could bring TB testing to the 21st century with its breathalyser. It basically uses a diode laser and fluorescence to make a determination within minutes. And, it's selective against other factors.

Source: RBS

It's not often that I get energized about a new product. After all, there are lots of trade press articles and conference presentations for that. And I tend to think that there are not really many new things under the sun. But I'll make an exception for the RBS breathalyser.

Oh, and by the way: I am not connected, financially or otherwise, to RBS.