Nichia 450nm (blue) diode : cost?

[ElektroFreak]

ANY diode that is not used in a CD/DVD/Blu-ray drive of some sort will be more expensive than diodes used in drives. It's a matter of supply and demand.. Many laser diodes will never be very affordable.

[Doc]

As long as there is a demand for the diodes at that price; they will continue to be that price.

[Asherz]

Like it's been said above, as long as a diode is used in a DVD burner or any other mass produced utensil it will become cheaper, but a blue diode is not needed for this purpose so there for it will remain expensive because only a select few people have a use for them.

I imagine as time goes on they will eventually become easier to produce, more companies start to make them, supplies become cheaper and the market flooded and thus $50 diodes yay (10 years?)

[allthatwhichis]

I want to stone the person who picked 405nm over 445nm for blu burners... We'd all be much happier had they picked 445.

[CDBEAM]

Avery bowdy moust geet stoned !!! This is what my dog ...Terra Watt sez !!!
Those BASTARDS will pay !!!!!

[maxh]

I imagine the laser TV market will eventually bring down the cost of blue laser diodes and speed up the development of green ones.

[CDBEAM]

A little known useless fact...the first Laser " pointer " ( Yes...the "P" word !!)
was called " The Spot " and was around $500 USD in 1990....for .5....yes...one half a MW ....so...technology does march on and on.....and today that same thing is $ 5.00 for 5MW....mmmm ???? so....who the heck knows what the 450nm DI will end up costing ??????????

"The Great and Powerfull...CDBEAM has spoken....er...ah...pay no attention to that man behind the curtain ".....

[FloggedSynapse]

Indeed the technology does progress.

"Progress on Green Laser diodes" (RP Photonics):
http://www.rp-photonics.com/spotlight_2009_08_14.html

The technology used by Nichia is not exactly new; they extended the technology of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) to longer wavelengths, mainly by improving the growth quality, and not by fundamental material changes or new device designs. They employed MOCVD growth technology, which is in principle common but not well established for that relatively new type of material system. The growth quality depends on many parameters of the MOCVD machine which can be tweaked. That tweaking is a rather tedious and expensive process, involving many expensive growth runs and extensive characterization of the samples produced. However, once a set of good parameters (a “sweet spot”) has been identified, it is comparatively inexpensive to produce many working samples, as many of them can be cut from a single wafer. (During the test phase, it doesn't help much to have a large wafer; you get more than you need to learn how well it worked.)

Shuji Nakamura is credited with developing the first viable BluRay laser diodes. It seems it was more a matter of perseverance and meticulous work than theoretical science. Early problems revolved around getting the growth of the crystal layers in the diode sandwich free of enough defects to allow lasing action and reasonable lifetime. This involved tweaking the MOCVD machine to suppress convections, and then essentially coming up with a recipe to grow the various xtal layers, even if the process was not entirely understood.

Unfortunately for visible diodes it has proven very difficult to get colors in the prime of the visual spectrum. Both 'recipes' (for red and violet LDs) produce frequencies on either end of the visual spectrum. It seems Red diodes have their highest quantum efficiency around 650nm - getting them much below 630nm is a challenge. The current InGaN chemistries used to make violet laser diodes can be tweaked to make blue and green laser diodes, but again with a loss of efficiency and lifetime. The green LDs discussed above may be less efficient than a well tuned DPSS laser, though it's still a much smaller package.

Anyway it's nice to see 450nm diodes are at least in production. Perhaps by the time I reach retirement age they'll be affordable.