Tuesday, August 23, 2011

TeraDiode gets $3.2M from DOD for powerful laser tech

By Rodney Brown

Quiet laser startup TeraDiode Inc. is ready to punch a big hole in its silence, announcing $3.2 million in a trio of SBIR contracts from no less than three different U.S. Department of Defense agencies.

What has the DOD so interested is the fact that TeraDiode has taken the common diode laser — the same sort of device in your CD player or laser pointer — and figured out how to gang many of them together and combine the beams into a much more powerful single laser beam. How powerful?

“Ours are a million time more powerful,” said CEO David Sossen, who noted the Littleton company’s technology allows them to take dozens of milliwatt-grade diode lasers and make a single beam in the kilowatt range. “It’s the Holy Grail of laser technology.”

The three DOD contracts are broken out as $1.1 million already awarded and $2.1 million committed but pending, the company said in a release. All three are Phase 1 contracts and TeraDiode expects all of them to result in follow-on Phase 2 contracts. Sossen was unable to describe the specific projects the DOD contracted them to work on, but he did note that possible uses could be in improved laser targeting systems, improved laser navigation systems or new non-lethal anti-personnel weapons, among others.

According to Sossen, other primary markets are in commercial and industrial laser systems, where a TeraDiode laser could replace an expensive carbon dioxide laser system — the industry standard — in metal cutting or welding. Because it is based on diodes, the TeraDiode laser system draws about 75 percent less electrical power to operate at the same beam strength as a CO2 laser, Sossen said.

During a demonstration of the laser cutting uses of the TeraDiode system, technical co-founder Robin Huang pointed out the cabinet that held the 30 strips of 19 diode lasers and the beam combining technology — a cabinet about the size of a wide PC enclosure. It has taken Huang and his research partner ten years to get it to that stage, however.

“This technology has been under development for about a decade at MIT Lincoln Laboratory,” Sosson said.

Huang and co-founder Bien Chann developed the technology, based on a principle called Wavelength Beam Combining, while working as researchers at MIT Lincoln Lab. They brought in Sossen, an experienced technology executive, and a fourth co-founder Fred Leonberger, the former CTO of JDS Uniphase Corp. With the technology and the team in place, the company took in an initial funding round of $4 million in 2009, the year it was founded, from Stata Venture Partners, Sossen said.

The breakthrough that he and Chann discovered is an optical principle, Huang said, that allows them to make a very powerful laser out of an array of weak diode lasers. Huang also noted that, because of the nature of combining the wavelengths of the beams in the TeraDiode system, the output can be at almost any part of the spectrum, and as narrow or as broad a spectrum as possible, even potentially leading to a so-called white-light laser that could be used in high-end 3-D projection systems.

Having so broad a claim of uses has its skeptics. According to Roland Lemieux, co-founder, president and applications engineer at Haverhill-based Boston Lasers, every kind of cutting and welding job requires its own special laser, and not all are suited for each job.

“Nothing can beat the CO2 for edge quality, and that is what is important for our customers,” Lemieux said.

In addition, Lemieux was not excited about the potential electricity cost savings. “It’s not a big deal. Our power consumption is probably only lower than the payroll of the guys.” He pays more for heating the shop every month than electricity, Lemieux said.

While the commercial world may need more convincing, having backers like Ray Stata and the Department of Defense may go a long way toward validating TeraDiode’s approach. Sossen said that there is no theoretical limit to how many diode lasers TeraDiode can combine — and he says that in the ten-year time frame the company could produce a megawatt-scale laser — practical heat concerns keep it in the low kilowatts right now.

TeraDiode plans to look for channel partners as integrators and resellers to sell their lasers in complete industrial cutting or welding systems, Sossen said. The 13-person company is in the process of closing a $10 million Series B round, and Sossen said that Stata Venture would be involved. That would bring the company to full-scale production.

“Our plan is to ramp to about 20 employees by the end of this year, and then double that a year after, and double again a year after that,” Sossen said.