May 28 2008
QPC Lasers, Inc., a world leader in the development and commercialization of high brightness, high power semiconductor lasers for the consumer electronics, industrial, defense, and medical markets, today announced it has been awarded a $750,000 contract to develop and deliver BrightLase® high power fiber laser pump engines to a U.S. Defense Customer for airborne directed energy weapons applications. This award is a follow-on contract to several previously announced awards, which, in conjunction with QPC's ongoing contract with this U.S. government customer, totals $2.5 million in contracts since 2007.
“QPC’s chip-based semiconductor lasers offer three unique elements crucial in achieving a truly deployable high energy laser weapon: high power, compactness and lightweight efficient design,” said Dr. Jeffrey Ungar, co-founder and CEO of QPC. “Today’s high-energy lasers are based on inefficient and bulky traditional technologies such as chemical lasers, but the future belongs to these more efficient and compact diode pumped lasers. As we continue our development of these cost effective high power laser prototypes, we continue to expand our capabilities in other commercial markets for our technologies, such as consumer electronics and medical, and to identify potential new customers around the world,” Ungar continued.
This new contract award allows QPC to further increase the power from levels targeted in previous contracts and accelerates the development and delivery of high power laser prototypes for potential deployment on this customer’s platforms. Under a previous and related contract, QPC recently delivered a BrightLase® high power laser to the same U.S. Government Department of Defense customer. (See press release dated April 23, 2008)
The prototypes utilize three of QPC’s patented and proprietary semiconductor laser technologies that are designed to achieve a 10x reduction of cost, size, and weight compared to conventional laser technology:
- Low cost, high power HPSEL™ chip technology which enables QPC to place hundreds of high-brightness surface emitting lasers onto a single chip which we believe will enable our products to achieve high power and brightness with a size, cost, and weight savings of more than 10x compared with conventional laser technologies.
- Rugged military fiber coupled module production capability designed for reliable operation in demanding military environments applications.
- BrightLase® high power high brightness lasers which are designed to produce laser beams more than ten times brighter than conventional semiconductor lasers used in industrial and medical applications.