June 15, 2006, San Jose, CA--The director of laser development at Picarro announced results of a reliability study covering their 488-nm cyan lasers that demonstrated a mean-time-to-failure, (MTTF) of 200,000 hours: a 25x improvement in reliability over argon ion lasers commonly used in instruments such as DNA sequencers, flow cytometers, microarray scanners and confocal microscopes. The results were presented at the SPIE Great Lakes Photonics Symposium in Dayton, Ohio by Dr. Steven Wallace, director of laser development at Picarro.
Many bio-instruments use air-cooled argon-ion lasers to induce fluorescence in marker dyes attached to biological cells, DNA strands or micro-spheres. Users generally must replace these lasers after 8,000 hours of operation or less. Frequency-doubled semiconductor lasers, according to the Picarro study, can dramatically reduce operating expenses for users of laser-based bio-instruments.
Picarro's reliability study is based on data from nearly 2 million installed device-hours and 200,000 device-hours from captive product tests. A thorough analysis of this data was conducted using rigorous statistical methods adapted from the telecommunications industry.