Search
Menu
PowerPhotonic Ltd. - High Power Laser Diode Optic Solutions LB 12/25
LinkedIn

Hank Hogan
Photonics Media

Hank HoganContributing Editor Hank Hogan holds a Bachelor of Science degree in physics from the University of Texas at Austin. He worked in the semiconductor industry and now writes about science and technology.

Articles
By Hank Hogan

September 2025
Automated Vision Systems Bolster Food Inspection
As the demand for quality food increases, producers are striving to hit the sweet spot of the market between nutrition and value. On top of this challenge, a variety of regulatory requirements...
June 2025
Advancements in 3D Vision Help Sort Inspection Tasks
For industrial applications, 3D vision systems have been improved in recent years, designed with greater inspection capabilities and enhanced performance in dynamic range, frame rate, and image...
March 2025
LEDs Shine Brighter in Machine Vision Applications
For potent implementation of light-emitting diodes (LEDs) and light sources in machine vision applications, illumination needs must be integrated into the initial system design. And because image...
January 2025
Thermal Industrial Inspection is Heating Up
Falling prices, rising resolutions, better analysis algorithms, and increased operational efficiency are expanding the use of thermal imaging in industrial inspections. These innovations are leading...
September 2024
Sensor and AI Advancements Boost Bin Picking Performance
Consider a robot performing bin picking, which involves recognizing randomly arranged objects, picking them up, and placing them in a new position. This process is essential in manufacturing, and its...
July 2024
Machine Vision with AI Assists Traffic Monitoring
According to analysts at INRIX, traffic congestion cost individual drivers in the U.S. $869 in 2022, an increase from $564 the previous year. In 2022, drivers in Germany and the U.K. lost $439 and...
March 2024
Hyperspectral Machine Vison Finds Its Place in a Growing Number of Sorting and Inspection Applications
PICVISA Machine Vision Systems of Spain is striving to make the world cleaner by enabling the automatic sorting of textile waste. This is a critically important task when it comes to meeting...
November 2023
Automotive Lighting Turns a Corner
Studies cited by the Independent Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) show that using automatic switching on old-fashioned high beams whenever possible reduces nighttime automotive crashes with...
September 2023
AI Aids Automotive Manufacturing Inspection
Alan Eddy is a machine vision specialist at Tensor ID, a system integrator that develops solutions to difficult manufacturing problems. The company has devised ways to overcome challenges for large...
September 2023
Vision Assesses Damaged Utility Poles
After a hurricane or tornado outbreak flattens buildings and destroys infrastructure, crews roll in to assess and repair the damage. Determining whether a wooden utility pole is gone may be...
June 2023
AI Brings New Capabilities to Bin Picking
Plucking individual objects from a collection, or bin picking, is a staple of manufacturing and processing. Robotic bin picking has been around for decades but often required special expertise to...
March 2023
Photonic Gas Analysis Probes Upgrades in Sources and Detectors
The hunt is on for better gas analyzers, driven by growing demands. For instance, hydrogen sulfide, an industrial byproduct, has a permissible worker exposure limit of 20 parts per million (ppm) in a...
March 2023
Cameras Capture Critical Data on Ejected Payloads
When a military aircraft ejects ammo, capsules, missiles, or auxiliary fuel tanks during flight, the risk of damage to the aircraft itself is sizeable. The risk is due both to turbulence and to the...
March 2023
Image Sensor Innovations Drive Automation Advancements
There’s arguably never been a more exciting time for the development of image sensors, with notable achievements in 3D imaging, event-based sensing, and nonvisible imaging. Recent innovations...
January 2023
New Sensor Materials and Designs Deepen SWIR Imaging Capabilities
Imaging in the shortwave infrared (SWIR) range, from 1000 to 2500 nm, offers significant new advantages in an array of applications, from autonomous vehicles to food quality inspection. SWIR...
September 2022
The Rise of Embedded Vision Puts FPGAs in the Spotlight
A field-programmable gate array (FPGA), as the name implies, is an integrated circuit that contains an array of transistor-based logic gates. The connections between these gates can be changed at...
August 2022
3D Printing Creates New Optical Possibilities
Emerging 3D printing technology is transforming once-impossible designs of optical components into optimized elements that can improve medical instruments, research tools, communications systems, and...
July 2022
More Processing Power for Today’s Smart Cameras
The newest industrial smart cameras feature significant advancements over their predecessors. 3D vision is becoming more common, and sophisticated onboard analytics are on the way to becoming...
July 2022
Advancements in Diffraction Grating Aim to Change the Rules
Because they separate light into its spectral components, diffraction gratings lie at the heart of modern spectrometers, hyperspectral imagers, optical coherence tomography systems, and similar...
June 2022
VCSELs Increase Power and Wavelength for 3D Sensing
For vertical-cavity surface-emitting lasers (VCSELs), the future looks bright — because their performance is rising while their price is falling. On the horizon is also a move from near-IR to...
May 2022
3D Vision Helps Operators Handle Hazardous Waste
The hazardous nature of radioactive materials requires that they be handled from a distance using a manipulator, a skill that can take an operator years to master. Work involving radioactive...
March 2022
Laser Shock Peening Fights Fatigue in Metal Parts
Laser shock peening is a process that adds beneficial residual stress points in materials commonly used to develop a wide range of parts and components. These residual stresses effectively increase...
February 2022
Inspecting: One Line at a Time
When Artemis Vision took on a label inspection application, the client had a set of stringent conditions: They required high-resolution image capture and lighting, along with the ability to manage...
January 2022
Vision System Sorts Tuna, Netting Fishermen More Profit
Commercial fishing operations face a number of challenges: the weather, fluctuating product prices, and an unpredictable daily catch. Added to these is the need to figure out exactly what’s...
January 2022
How Optical Networks Are Enabling the 5G Advantage
The fifth generation of broadband cellular network technology (5G) offers a more than tenfold increase in speed compared to 4G. It handles a wider variety of devices, provides greater reliability,...
December 2021
Thermal Inspection Ensures Sterility of Medical Devices
Maintaining a sterile environment inside the operating room is critical. This extends to surfaces, the garments of the surgeons performing the procedures, and the medical devices themselves. To...
December 2021
Photonics Offers Clues to the Future of Forensics
Spectroscopy has always been a promising tool for criminal investigators, offering noncontact and often nondestructive methods for deriving important clues that may otherwise go unseen, unidentified,...
December 2021
Pandemic Buying Puts Focus on Mobile Barcode Readers
An audible beep often indicates a successful barcode scan. Such scans are performed 6 billion times a day, according to the global supply chain barcode standards company GS1 US. Barcode scanners are...
November 2021
Scientific Cameras Push the Boundaries of Speed and Sensitivity
Scientific applications push imaging to the extremes. They demand cameras that can capture events as they unfold over nanoseconds, or capture processes that produce only a few photons across a broad...
November 2021
UV Lasers: Short in Wavelength, Long on Potential
For compact UV lasers, advancements in technology and applications could make the sky the limit — literally. When NASA’s Perseverance rover landed on Mars in February, for example, it...
October 2021
A New Wavefront of Adaptive Optics Promises Improvements
Adaptive optics (AO) technology enables Earth-based telescopes to take the twinkle out of the stars. The technology also helps in detecting and reversing eye disease, it improves the throughput of...
August 2021
Polarization Cameras Get Ready for Prime Time
Polarization can remove glare in vision systems and improve imaging through transparent materials such as glass. This capability is beneficial for surface inspection of film thickness or tilt angle....
August 2021
Photonics Shapes the Worlds of Augmented and Virtual Reality
Replacing smartphones with smart glasses isn’t practical … yet. In the meantime, advancements in photonics are helping to expand the use of smart glasses in educational, medical,...
August 2021
Laser Micromachining Fires Up the Next Little Thing
Driven by demand from automotive, electronics, medical devices, and other end markets, the micromachining market is on track to grow at a 6.9% compound annual growth rate over the next six years to...
July 2021
Vision Chronicles Charter Boats’ Catch of the Day
The old saying that teaching someone to fish leads to a lifetime of food needs updating. With today’s machine vision technology, imaging the fishing catch can result in a lifetime of savings...
June 2021
Embedded Vision Is Set for Application on a Massive Scale
Compact, efficient, and highly application specific, embedded vision technology increasingly offers performance and price points that would have been impossible to achieve only a few years ago. The...
June 2021
Photonics Scores a Touchdown for Space Exploration
As the Apollo 11 astronauts were initiating the first human-crewed landing on the moon, Neil Armstrong looked out of the module’s small window and, rather than observing a relatively flat...
May 2021
High-Res Imaging Verifies Car Door Panels Are Scratch-Free
Sometimes the right picture is all the proof that is needed. Craig Machinery & Design, based in Louisville, Ky., builds automation equipment for manufacturers and specializes in the plastic...
May 2021
Embedded Vision and AI Transform Retail Shopping
A worldwide pandemic that upended social interactions and economic activity put retailers to the test. In an environment where profit margins are always thin, retailers must meet customer...
May 2021
The Food Industry’s Appetite for Hyperspectral Imaging Grows
If the old maxim “you are what you eat” has any truth to it, then it becomes critically important to ensure that the food you consume is safe and of suitable quality. To this end, the...
March 2021
High-Energy Lasers Advance Defense and Industry
Ever since the laser first appeared in the public consciousness, popular culture has reframed it as a prospective weapon of infinite range and power. This is largely because popular culture is...
February 2021
High-Speed Vision System Examines Laser Copper Welds
As electric-powered vehicles of all kinds increasingly hit the roads, industry faces a problem: connectivity. A reliable connection between electrical components — which will need to be made...
February 2021
Vision Tracks Food Waste in Commercial Kitchens
One third of all food grown disappears somewhere between farm and table, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, resulting in the loss of $1 trillion per year and accounting for about 8% of...
February 2021
3D Vision Bolsters Robotic Bin Picking
For robots, unstructured bin picking has traditionally been challenging, if not effectively impossible. Part of the reason is mechanical, since getting a robotic arm into a bin and securing its grip...
January 2021
Embedded Vision Is Streamlined for Application on a Massive Scale
Compact, efficient, and highly application specific, embedded vision technology increasingly offers performance and price points that would have been impossible to achieve only a few years ago. The...
January 2021
Nonvisible Imaging Expands Resolution, Range, Applications
The ability to image beyond the visible spectrum offers more than a quantitative expansion of our perceptions. It also provides qualitative improvements with applicable value to public health,...
December 2020
Lasers and LEDs Layer on New Capabilities for Additive Manufacturing
Additive manufacturing, aka 3D printing, offers an alternative to conventional manufacturing and assembly methods by building products layer by layer. In addition to enabling heretofore impossible...
November 2020
High-Speed Cameras Accelerate Cancer Screenings
Finding a solitary cancer cell in the midst of millions of healthy ones is no small feat. But that’s what researcher Andrew Filby does, thanks to a camera system that is capable of streaming at...
November 2020
For Smart Factories, a Vision of Success
Smart factories require collecting information about products, processes, and people to achieve highly automated manufacturing. In this undertaking, machine vision will supply key data. ...
November 2020
Spotting Defects in Solar Panels in the Field
Falling prices for solar panels, along with the desires of dozens of countries to reach renewable energy goals, led to an estimated 114.5 GW of global photovoltaic (PV) installations in 2019,...
August 2020
Drones Deliver a Fresh Take on Airborne Imaging Applications
Initially swooping in to provide aerial shots in big-budget movies, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) — or drones, in consumer parlance — are now bringing aerial cinematography technology...
August 2020
Vision System Brings Glass Measurements into Focus
For an example of a high-stakes measurement, talk to Dan Bukaty Jr. He’s president of Precision Glass & Optics (PG&O) of Santa Ana, Calif., an optical fabrication shop that makes...
August 2020
On the Field, Vision Tracks the Action
Sports are big business. Revenues of U.S.-based Major League Baseball hit $10.7 billion in 2019. The German Bundesliga, a top-tier soccer league, took in over €4 billion ($4.5 billion) that same...
August 2020
Tiny Quantum Effects Promise Big Impact on Future Instruments
While the quantum world may seem abstract and remote from day-to-day life, researchers are discovering that quantum effects such as photon entanglement could improve the performance and precision of...
July 2020
Vision Systems Perform Vital Checks on Medical Devices
Medical device manufacturing encompasses products that go inside the body, such as catheters and artificial joints. Other manufactured goods in this category include external devices that measure...
July 2020
Photonic Technologies Energize Sustainability
It could be a greener world, thanks to photonic technologies. That’s the conclusion of a 2020 study1 forecasting that photonics could eliminate 3 billion tons of CO2 emissions annually by 2030....
June 2020
Hybrid Photonics Expands Capabilities
Alone, nothing is perfect. So when various materials in photonics applications work in tandem, a better performing hybrid approach arises, and teamwork prevails. Examples of such hybrid photonics can...
May 2020
Imaging Goes 4D
3D imaging has taken off, with applications in cellphones, cars, robots, and more. Now, companies and researchers are looking to what’s next: 4D. While 3D imaging captures information...
May 2020
Vision Verifies Cookie Orders
If expected cookies don’t arrive, customer satisfaction crumbles. But ensuring a happy outcome is often a tall order. Evans Distribution Systems Inc. of Melvindale, Mich., used to manually...
May 2020
Industrial Machine Vision Adds Depth
Adding imaging depth to vision systems can improve inspection performance, enhance pick-and-place operations, and help vision-guided robots do a better job of avoiding objects. With falling prices...
April 2020
Ramping Up with High-Intensity Lasers
In Europe, China, and the U.S., laser projects — either built or planned — are ramping up intensity, with systems now reaching peak power of 10 petawatts (PW), or 10 million billion...
March 2020
Consumer Electronics Inspection Put to the Test
Every year, smartphones, TVs, tablets, and computers get more capable in terms of screen resolution and processing power. Better consumer electronics and more demand have led to volume increases....
February 2020
Car In-Cabin 3D Sensing Is Within Sight
It is expected that in the future, cars will drive themselves. Between now and then, though, cars will partially drive themselves, much like today’s Tesla with Autopilot. Ensuring that drivers...
January 2020
Mobile Inspection Station for A-Arms Gets an A
As the name implies, an A-arm, or control arm, looks like the letter “A.” It connects the wheels to a vehicle’s frame and enables steering. For one maker of A-arms, machine...
January 2020
Vision Inspects Wall Plates in a Flash
Wall plates are everywhere — covering electrical receptacles by the dozens in every home and by the hundreds in any moderately sized building. Therefore, wall plates are made in high volume and...
January 2020
Metamaterials Extend Photonics
Metamaterials — engineered to have unique photonic and other properties — can enable previously difficult or impossible-to-achieve performance. Radar or lidar steering, for instance, can...
December 2019
Improving Devices with Plasmonics
Researchers are putting electron oscillations, or plasmons, to work and paving the way for instruments that could improve food safety and devices for future mobile communications. Additionally,...
December 2019
Medical Imaging Technology Exploits Light, Sound
Photoacoustic imaging, or the use of light to create sound, can result in better diagnoses of solid tumors in breast, thyroid, and other cancers, as well as reveal the development of Crohn’s...
November 2019
With Innovations, Lasers Boost Performance
With their performance rising, semiconductor lasers may be able to best their fiber-based counterparts in a wide variety of applications. On the horizon are potential game changers, such as...
October 2019
Better Biomedicine via 3D Imaging
Advancements in biomedical 3D imaging promise to improve research findings and clinical outcomes, thereby producing widespread benefits. In research, a combination of techniques will enable...
October 2019
Vision Systems Regulate Traffic, Improve Safety
On the roads at any given moment, there are traffic accidents, stopped vehicles, and drivers going the wrong way on one-way streets. All of these incidents adversely affect traffic flow and lead to...
August 2019
Lens-Free Microscopy Focuses on Commercialization
With advancements in image processing and sensors, lens-free microscopy is ready for a closer look by researchers, industry, and consumers. Compared to traditional benchtop microscopes, lens-free...
August 2019
Improved Lasers and Techniques Benefit Materials Processing
For laser materials processing systems, power levels are up, costs are down, and there are innovations in beam delivery and control. These developments are expanding the use of lasers in welding,...
July 2019
For Carmakers, Inspection Flexibility Makes the Difference
Building a car is a complex process, and it’s getting more complex every year. There are thousands of parts to inspect for quality and conformance to ever tighter specifications. What’s...
July 2019
Data Centers and More for Silicon Photonics
Decades of research and development are finally paying off for silicon nanophotonics. The silicon optical transceiver market, for example, is projected to grow nearly twentyfold in volume over the...
June 2019
A History of the Laser: 1960 - 2019
In 2020, the laser will celebrate its 60th anniversary. Here Photonics Media presents a timeline of some of the more notable scientific accomplishments related to light amplification by stimulated...
June 2019
An Avalanche of APD Innovations
When autonomous vehicles hit the streets, they navigate with the help of avalanche photo­diodes, or APDs. These semiconductor photodetectors capture returning laser pulses as part of lidar systems,...
April 2019
Computational Imaging Builds Better Pictures
A picture may be worth more than a thousand words after passing through mathematical algorithms and modern computer hardware. Such a process, known as computational imaging, can speed up data...
April 2019
Ever-Vigilant: Machine Learning and AI Move into Surveillance
The business of surveillance, whether by still or video camera, is booming. It’s being driven by military, industrial, and commercial customers as well as consumers. According to a report by...
February 2019
Imaging in the Blink of an Eye
CMOS cameras and sensors are getting faster. That’s good news for researchers and for the autonomous vehicles market, among others. For researchers, faster imaging enhances spectroscopy,...
February 2019
Innovations in Machine Vision Bolster Food Inspection
Machine vision has long been employed effectively in packaging inspection, where barcode readers and cameras verify that boxes are properly labeled. Increasingly, vision is playing a critical role in...
January 2019
Micro-LEDs Could Have a Big Impact on Displays
Small, as in microscopic, LEDs promise brighter displays and longer-running mobile devices, but only after manufacturers overcome several challenges. Known as micro-LEDs, these semiconductor chips...
January 2019
Optics Improvements Prompt Enhanced Component Parameters
For defense and security applications, size matters. So do weight, power, and cost. These four parameters are often referred to as SWaP-C, a key concept that drives the manufacture of defense and...
January 2019
The Growing Role of Lasers in Treatments for Better Blood Flow
For some cardiovascular patients, laser-based procedures have become the best, and perhaps only, option to relieve pain and restore function associated with many diseases of the heart, arteries, and...
December 2018
Data Needs Drive Underwater Fiber Developments
Data traffic will nearly double in the next three years, according to analysts. Many bits will travel between data centers over land, and many will make the long journey across the ocean, moving...
November 2018
Trends in Industrial Laser Solutions
The demands on lasers grow as the need for precision in manufacturing and other applications increases. In general, lasers enable processes that cannot be performed economically in any other way...
October 2018
For Self-Driving Cars, Sensors Galore
Self-driving cars bring both opportunities and challenges to photonics-based sensors. Autonomous vehicles will need dozens of sensors of many types — lidar, camera, radar, and ultrasonic...
October 2018
Optical Coating Innovations Push Performance
Optical coatings improve the performance of mirrors, lenses, and light-emitting or absorbing semiconductors by enhancing transmission and reducing reflection. They also harden surfaces, allowing...
August 2018
Emerging Applications Drive Image Sensor Innovations
CMOS sensors are being taken for a ride. Forecasts call for image sensor market growth to be driven by automobiles, with increasing use of lidar, cameras, and sensors. To not hit a stop sign, though,...
August 2018
With Lasers, 3D Printing on a Miniature Scale
Copies of buildings and the Statue of Liberty that are only microns tall — these are examples of what’s been done with three-dimensional nanolithography, known as 3D nanoprinting. Also...
July 2018
Optics Tools Advance in New Forms with Space Exploration
With a new generation of large telescopes comes new challenges for optics. Some mirrors, for instance, must be large but flexible to perform wavefront correction and make the images as clear as...
June 2018
Improving Automation with 3D Vision
If a traditional picture is worth a thousand words, what’s the value of a 3D image? Quite a bit when it comes to automation. Consider a robot picking a part out of a bin in an automated...
June 2018
Better Filters Yield Better Sensor Performance
From weather satellites to lidar for self-driving cars, precision optical filters play a vital role in making sensors work. Today, the ability to interrogate more and more sections of spectrum...
April 2018
For Small MOEMS, Big Opportunities Lie Ahead
Following the path of semiconductors and mechanical devices, optical systems are shrinking in size and growing in capabilities, thanks to micro-optoelectromechanical systems (MOEMS). These combine...
March 2018
Thinnest of Materials Loom Large
Only a few atomic layers thick, 2D materials such as graphene, the compound semiconductor germanium selenium, the transition metal dichalcogenide molybdenum ditelluride, and others could provide new...
February 2018
Getting the Total Picture, Remotely
Thanks to advances in photonics and image processing, scientists, farmers and others can get a better picture of what’s going on across a landscape. With cameras operating over large swaths of...
January 2018
Getting More Out of Telecom Fiber
The rising amount of data generated by people and machines around the world travels largely by fiber, with some of it moving thousands of miles in a hop. For some long jumps, new ultralow-loss, large...
November 2017
New Laser Technologies Displacing Old
For some CO2 laser applications, the end is at hand, with fiber lasers having almost totally replaced the older technology. Another shift currently brewing is due to the arrival of high-power diode...
November 2017
3D Imaging Aids Life Sciences
While human bodies and single cells are three-dimensional, imaging of them often was not. Data might be captured in two-dimensional slices during a computed tomography, magnetic resonance, ultrasound...
October 2017
Thin 2D Materials Pack a Heavy Punch
Two-dimensional materials such as graphene, as well as composite materials such as the layered semiconductor germanium selenium, could have a big impact on myriad applications. Composite...

Explore Our Content
News
Feature Articles
Latest Products
Webinars
White Papers
All Things Photonics Podcast
Photonics Spectra Now
Videos
Our Summits & Conferences
Industry Events
Bookstore
Join Our Community
Subscribe
Advertise
Become a member
Sign in
Contribute a Feature
Suggest a Webinar
Submit a Press Release
Mobile Apps

About Us
Our Company
Our Publications
Editorial Advisory Board
Contact Us
Career Opportunities
Teddi C. Laurin Scholarship

Terms & Conditions
Privacy Policy
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA)



©2025 Photonics Media
100 West St.
Pittsfield, MA, 01201 USA
info@photonics.com
We use cookies to improve user experience and analyze our website traffic as stated in our Privacy Policy. By using this website, you agree to the use of cookies unless you have disabled them.