White Light Fibre Lasers - Highly Disruptive Illumination Technology for Industry and Medical Surgery

ended

WhiteLase-2020 addresses the need in semiconductor manufacturing and medical markets for a high-end, industrially-robust, high-brightness illumination source having the spectrum of a lamp and the beam quality and reliability of a laser. Such a source will disrupt the €600m global market for industrial lighting and be a key enabler for the combined €7.5 billion Ophthalmic and Semiconductor Equipment markets which depend on them. Within the WhiteLase-2020 project, Fianium will overcome the challenges of engineering a newly developed (2014) scientific technology demonstrator into a compact, robust, industrially qualified illumination source capable of volume manufacture with 10X reduction in unit price. The resulting project outputs will be a truly disruptive light source qualified to customer-provided specifications and will enable Fianium to quickly develop a commercial product, establish manufacturing capability to customer-forecast annual volumes of 2000-units and achieve revenues in excess of €20M, from 2018. WhiteLase-2020 illumination sources will be more than 1.25 Million times brighter than high power Xenon lamps and will be capable of replacing more than 16 individual high power laser diodes. Furthermore, the technology will be qualified to lifetimes in excess of 20,000 hours and will be designed for manufacture in volume with unit price below €10,000 (10X reduction). The project outcomes will present end users with enormous performance and cost benefits over existing state-of-art. The light sources will totally disrupt existing markets within 2 years of the project, replacing high power lamps, LED's and multi-colour laser diode modules. Furthermore, new markets will be generated over the following decade through the availability of this unique illumination technology.