Hi guys,
Some of you know that we had an intern come to work with Pangolin for around six months. His name is Francesco, and he goes by the PL handle "Uncle Worm". Francesco is a graduate student studying lasers and laser diodes. His project at Pangolin was advanced laser diode driver studies and topics.
Some of the first things he did at Pangolin was to evaluate the existing laser diode drivers out there. We purchased numerous units and also acquired things from friends. These were anything from cheap, home-built drivers on eBay to top-level drivers from Coherent and Wavelength Electronics. After the analysis, we came to one single conclusion. We didn't like literally a single one of them... Amazing! Nobody, and I mean nobody, has taken into consideration the things we believe should be taken into consideration within a laser diode driver.
We then turne our attention to ESD protection since that is a kind of fundamental problem for all laser diodes. We acquired three separate ESD guns for the testing, and we tested every known ESD protection scheme for a laser diode. Yes, including Schottky diodes and varistors. Our conclusion is that -- basically, with few exceptions (those exceptions generally not being applicable to the types of lasers used by PL members), nothing really works.
Folks, there has been a lot of wishful thinking being done with respect to ESD protection. Engineers have put these things around a laser diode, hoping that they would work, but never actually testing them with a real ESD gun. In fact, many Schottky diodes and capacitors were themselves destroyed by ESD.
We then conceived of a few alternative ESD protection schemes and tested them with a real ESD gun. Amazingly (the reason it's so amazing is because nothing else works) our schemes work! We call the resulting device LASORB and you can read about it here:
www.lasorb.com
We also built a laser diode driver with LASORB technology built in. LASORB isn't the only feature of this driver. It basically has many of the things we find missing in other laser diode drivers. We built this driver just as a test. Francesco is bugging me to sell them, but so far we just haven't decided what to do with it...
LASORB itself will certainly be for sale as a part people can buy and apply to their driver. We just need to figure out the packaging and encapsulation and that's what we are doing right now.
I will turn our little LASORB power point into a PDF and then attach it to this post in the future.
Best regards,
William Benner