Project Brief
General Competition (March 1991)Tunable Deep UV and VUV Solid-State Laser SourceApplication of recent developments in laser technology to produce high-average-power ultraviolet lasers for medical, electronic materials processing, and scientific applications that are cheaper, safer, more reliable, and easier to use than current products. Light Age is an EPIC 100 firm, selected by the Commerce Department's International Trade Administration for special export promotion. Sponsor: Light Age, Inc.Two Riverview DriveSomerset, NJ 07059
Commercial lasers are a $1 billion market and growing, fueled by applications in photolithography for the semiconductor industry, materials processing, and medical and scientific instrumentation. Short-wavelength light sources in the ultraviolet (UV) or vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) ranges are particularly desirable, but today such sources are restricted to large, expensive synchrotrons, excimer-pumped lasers, or dye lasers which have been inefficiently "frequency upconverted." The latter two require facilities for dealing with toxic and mutagenic gases or liquids. Light Age proposes to develop two comparatively new laser technologies to produce a broadly tunable, solid-state laser light source for the UV and VUV. The new source will be based on a marriage of tunable alexandrite lasers and recently developed techniques for shifting laser frequencies using novel non-linear crystals. This approach could provide researchers, doctors, and engineers with high-average-power ultraviolet lasers that are cheaper, safer, more compact, more efficient, and more reliable than any now on the market. This could be particularly significant in the semiconductor processing industry, now dominated by Japanese equipment manufacturers.
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