Taiwan's Arima Optoelectronics Corp. is expanding the OEM production scale of its semiconductor lasers for DVDs. The company is planning to finish the work to expand its production lines in March 2002 to accomplish its monthly mass-production scale of 2 million at the end of the year. Mainstay products will have power output ranging from 5W-50W and a wavelength of 635nm-660nm, it said. According to Arima, those new semiconductor laser products feature less power consumption than existing semiconductor lasers. Improved light emission efficiencies contributed to lowering power consumption, the company said. Light emission efficiencies were improved by raising concentration of impurities of a surface, p-type layer that forms semiconductor lasers.

Arima said that a few Japanese companies already have evaluated its lasers highly, and one maker said the lasers could be used on a commercial basis anytime now.

It also is conducting R&D efforts for semiconductor lasers with a wavelength of 1.3-1.55 micron for optical communications. Among them, blue violet semiconductor lasers using GaN materials are said to be in development by the company at its research institute in the United Kingdom.