Dec/090
LCD price fixing fines so far reaches $860 million, shame CONSUMER gets NOTHING
It’s not every day we get to cite an official US Department of Justice news release, so it’s with a certain glee that we can announce the US taxpayer was last week enriched by another $220 million courtesy of the not-so-fine folks who swindled him out of that money in the first place. Joining the ignominious ranks of LG, Sharp, Hitachi and Chungwa Picture Tube, Taiwanese manufacturer Chi Mei is refunding the US state for the pecuniary impact of its collusive practices, which were primarily related to keeping prices artificially high and profits proportionately inflated. US companies directly affected by these ignoble activities include HP, Dell and Apple, but don’t you worry, AT&T has already started the inter-corporation scuffle, with Nokia piling on for good measure. Man, it almost seems like crime doesn’t pay
Sep/090
Semiconductor Laser for Triple, Quadruple-layer Blu-ray Discs – Sharp
Sharp Corp developed a blue-violet semiconductor laser whose optical output is as high as 500mW under pulsed operation for use in Blu-ray Disc (BD) recorders.
It has an oscillation wavelength of 405nm and a capability of writing at 8x speed on triple- and quadruple-layer Blu-ray discs. The company started volume production of a blue-violet semiconductor laser with 320mW pulsed output in June 2009.
Sharp has not decided when to mass-produce the new blue-violet semiconductor laser because the specifications of triple or more layer Blu-ray disc have not been determined yet. However, the company claimed that it is now ready to commercialize the laser.
Sharp enhanced the optical output by using a new method of processing the edge face of a resonator. Normally, the edge face of a crystal in a semiconductor laser is protected by a dielectric film. This time, the company formed an aluminum oxynitride (AlON) film between the edge face of the semiconductor laser and the dielectric film by a sputtering method and realized an epitaxial growth where the growth axis of the laser’s crystal corresponds to that of the AlON crystal.
In the past, the crystal of a semiconductor laser was just covered by a noncrystalline dielectric film. Therefore, the edge face of the crystal had a surface state and absorbed laser light, and the crystal was degraded by the heat and stopped oscillation.
Sharp has already verified the reliability of the new blue-violet semiconductor laser. It confirmed that the laser operated for more than 1,000 hours under the temperature of 80°C with a pulse width of 30ns and an output of 500mW.