Tokyo, Japan, April 26, 2004--Furukawa Electric has released a 488-nm single-harmonic generation (SHG) blue laser suitable for bioinstrumentation and medical equipment. The company says it is leveraging its experience in optical devices for telecommunications and plans to expand its product portfolio in the biomedical area with optical devices, equipment, and instrumentation.

The 488-nm SHG laser contains a fiber-coupled 976-nm source and a SHG device. A fiber Bragg grating (FBG) stabilized 976-nm semiconductor laser with polarization maintaining fiber output. Reflectivity of FBG has been tuned to control the longitudinal mode of laser oscillation, followed by stable wavelength conversion. According to the company, this simple configuration resulted in a fewer number of components with high reliability.

Furukawa will demonstrate the laser at CLEO 2004 in San Francisco next month.

Mon Apr 26 08:38:00 CDT 2004