488nm SHG blue laser for biomedical application

April 26, 2004

Furukawa Electric (Other OTC:FUWAF) has made production release of 488nm SHG blue laser suitable for bioinstrumentation and medical equipment. Furukawa Electric has established high performance and highly reliable optical technologies and experiences for optical telecommunication application. Now they are introduced into this blue laser product. Furukawa Electric is going to expand product portfolio in bio and medical area including device, equipment and instrument.

· Background

Market of 488nm blue laser is one of growing area. It is used for several applications in biomedical field like analytical equipment, cell analysis by fluorescent microscope and DNA analyzers. Furukawa Electric has started development of 488nm blue laser using semiconductor laser and wavelength conversion device and overcome these problems. Furukawa Electric is the market leader of 1480nm and 980nm semiconductor pumping laser diode for the telecommunication. Those technologies are successfully deployed in this product. We have done official release of this blue laser product from April 2004 after we have got several positive feedbacks from our potential customers in our sampling stage. We are going to exhibit and demonstrate this blue laser in CLEO 2004 to be held at San Francisco from May 18th.

· Features of this product

488nm SHG laser contains two smart technologies of fiber coupled 976nm source and SHG device. Fiber bragg grating (FBG) stabilized 976nm semiconductor laser with polarization maintaining fiber output is used for initial light source. Reflectivity of FBG has been carefully tuned to control the longitudinal mode of laser oscillation then stable wavelength conversion has realized with SHG device. This simple configuration enabled us to reduce number of components with high reliability. Converted 488nm light is coupled to single mode fiber so the ideal gaussian beam with excellent pointing stability has been realized.

· Specifications

· About Furukawa Electric

Furukawa Electric is a designer, manufacturer, and supplier of leading edge optical fiber and cables, photonic products, power cables, nonferrous metals, electronics devices.
Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, Furukawa operates facilities in United States, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, United Kingdom, Hungary, The Netherlands, Czech Republic, and Asian countries.