Features | Photonics Spectra

Features

Three forces direct the evolution of machine vision: Enabling technology determines what is possible, algorithms determine what is practical, and applications determine what is desirable. Machine vision depends on two kinds of enabling technology, sensors and processors, but the field has not been economically powerful enough to significantly influence either. We use components designed primarily for other purposes and, from this, derive the enormous price/performance leverage generated by ...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Imaging/Detectors: Photomultipliers

Application demands for increased performance are stimulating photomultiplier manufacturers to continuously improve detectors and develop innovative devices. The demands are coming both from traditional applications such as gamma cameras and...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Imaging/Detectors: Scientific Imaging

Five years ago, high-performance charge-coupled device cameras were slow, monolithic and difficult to use. Today, the cameras are significantly faster, often much smaller and almost completely software-controlled. In the coming several years, we...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Instrumentation & Accessories: Positioning

Decades ago, few people believed that industry would ever need to move macroscopic bodies by nanometers. Today it is a necessity. One example is in data storage. With the constant need for more storage capacity in smaller packages, drive components...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Instrumentation & Accessories: Test Equipment

During this decade, the telecommunications industry has been making a transition from a slowly growing network optimized for voice traffic to one whose bandwidth needs are exploding to keep pace with data exchange between computers. Fiber optic...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Instrumentation & Accessories: Using Photons

Instrumentation and accessories are seeing the same kinds of market trends as other photonics technologies. "Better, faster, cheaper" is a contagious battle cry. Laboratory equipment and OEM components are shrinking in both size and cost while...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Lasers and Light Sources: High-Power Diode Lasers

During the last several years, high-power diode lasers based on bars have developed rapidly both in optical output and in lifetime. In only five years, the typical output from a single commercially available diode laser jumped from 20 to 50 W...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Lasers and Light Sources: Industrial Lasers

The market for industrial lasers has largely been dominated by high-power CO2 and lamp-pumped Nd:YAG lasers. These devices have provided cost-effective access to high-power infrared and visible laser emission for applications that include cutting,...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Lasers and Light Sources: Making Photons

By valuing reliability, efficiency and economy above gadgetry and engineering elegance, the communications, medical and manufacturing markets are changing the laser business. These customers are generously rewarding laser manufacturers who can share...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Lasers and Light Sources: UV Lasers

One application trend vital to the future of UV laser makers has been the miniaturization of electronic devices brought on by an explosive demand for communications and information technology. As demand increases for portable gadgets such as...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Optics, Materials & Coatings

Changes in the optics market are coming, and fast. The Internet and overnight courier services have changed customer expectations for service and immediate delivery. Improved PCs and easy-to-use optical design software are enabling customers without...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Optics, Materials & Coatings: Design Software

Any designer knows that real lenses aren’t just surfaces; they’re whole objects with edges, bevels, scratches, bubbles and so on. In real optical systems, some light always reflects when it should refract, and that light has the annoying...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Optics, Materials & Coatings: Interference Filters

Optical filters separate wavelengths of light using the principle of optical interference. For 25 years, filter technology has enabled products such as missile guidance and target recognition, medical diagnostic tools, analytical instruments,...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Optics, Materials & Coatings: Micro-Optics

The telecommunications industry was one of the first users of micro-optics, back in the 1980s. The integration of semiconductor lasers, micro-optics and fibers into small packages was the economic basis of efficient optical networks. Today...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Optics, Materials & Coatings: UV Optics

Ten years ago, the ultraviolet- transmitting optic was considered a mature, developed product. Today market forces are challenging suppliers to dramatically improve UV optical performance. Suppliers who can meet the challenge will participate in at...

Photonics Spectra, January 2000

Clouds in the Crystal Ball

An expert is someone who can accurately predict how a certain technology will progress in the next 12 to 18 months. An authority can extend the prediction relatively accurately to five years or so. A visionary looks ahead 10 years or more and is...

Photonics Spectra, December 1999

Photonics Gets Personal

The last time the millennial clock rolled over, the only individuals that required some stamp of personal identification sat on thrones. Signet rings and hot wax made a simple task of identifying the agents of a king and verifying official business....

Photonics Spectra, December 1999

Photovoltaics Grows Up

Long dismissed by some pundits as expensive and impractical, photovoltaic cells, also known as solar cells, are a popular way to generate electricity in remote areas. John Benner, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden,...

Photonics Spectra, December 1999

Sensing the Century

The Deep Space 2 microprobe, which recently slammed into Mars, only hints at what’s possible in the next century as smart sensors merge with biological and chemical systems, according to Barbara Wilson, chief technologist and director of...

Photonics Spectra, December 1999

The Photon Connection

Wearable, miniature computers that moonlight as movie viewers with nearly unlimited selections. Enough bandwidth to simultaneously connect every living person through just one optical fiber. These are the applications that photonics should enable by...

Photonics Spectra, December 1999

A Start on Parts for Multiphoton Microscopy

Ten years ago, in a Cornell University laboratory in Ithaca, N.Y., researchers unveiled the first multiphoton microscope for biological imaging. The biomedical research community quickly realized the virtue of the technology, which demonstrated that...

Photonics Spectra, November 1999

Beyond Franklin’s Kite

When scientists at Hydro-Quebec, one of Canada’s largest power companies, want to see how a piece of electrical equipment holds up under the blast of a lightning bolt -- which can go as high as 300,000 amperes -- they plop it down in the...

Photonics Spectra, November 1999

Inside the Head of a Systems Integrator

Somewhere, someday, someone may employ photonics to build a better mousetrap. The invention will require some sort of sensing component -- an interferometer, perhaps, or an infrared camera equipped with illumination, an image processor and...

Photonics Spectra, November 1999

From Earth to Space, Lasers Take on Pollution

Recent advances in solid-state-laser and nonlinear optics technology are increasing the performance, versatility and reliability of the lasers that we can design into sensing systems. The monitoring and management of air quality is of direct concern...

Photonics Spectra, October 1999

Plastics Learn to Love Lasers

For many years, Nd:YAG, CO2 and high-power semiconductor lasers have been successfully cutting, welding and marking on metals, ceramics and other materials. You need look no further than your computer keyboard or the buttons on your automobile radio...

Photonics Spectra, October 1999

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