BluGlass Limited (ASX:BLG) President Jim Haden discusses achieving a key reliability milestone for the company’s laser diodes.
Tim McGowen: I’m Tim McGowen for the Finance News Network. Today we’re talking with BluGlass. If you don’t know the company, ASX Code BLG. It’s got a market cap of around $39 million. BluGlass has been developing leading-edge semiconductor manufacturing technology and devices for more than a decade. The company’s a global provider to the GaN photonics industries, developing cutting-edge custom laser and LED development across the industrial, defence, display and scientific markets. We’re talking today to Mr. Jim Haden, who is president of BluGlass. Welcome Jim. Thanks for your time.
Jim Haden: Thank you, Tim.
Tim McGowen: Jim, BluGlass has announced the achievement of a critical technical milestone, demonstrating feasible reliability of its laser diodes. Can you tell us about the technical demonstration?
Jim Haden: We are excited because our BluGlass’ gallium nitride lasers have passed 500 hours of continuous operation with stable optical and electrical performance. These lasers have maintained good performance and light output during a 20-25C life test. That’s basically at room temperature, demonstrating light output with less than 20% degradation. This is a key commercial standard for laser diodes and it’s a direct result of our focus on enhancing our metals, our facets, our bonding capability, and also our epi. And it’s been completed by BluGlass’ team internally and our contract manufacturers.
So it’s basically a culmination of a huge amount of effort by our talented team. And this reliability testing is ongoing. It’s a demonstration of feasible reliability and it basically forms an essential foundation for all of our laser products, helping us move forward. In other words, we established a base from which we can, and our poise to iterate further improvements off those.
Tim McGowen: Jim, reliability is an essential requirement in laser diodes. Can you tell us why this is a critical technical and commercial milestone in your development roadmap?
Jim Haden: Yes. The short wavelength is particularly difficult to achieve reliability. So demonstrating these reliable laser diodes is a significant milestone because it shows the suitability of our visible lasers for use in a broad range of applications. And it’s a critical prerequisite needed ahead of what we might call beta or fixed design production launches. And so, it enables BluGlass to increase our engagement with customers who are waiting to put products into their designs, alpha and beta products. And so this milestone basically paves the way for BluGlass to achieve our commercial and technical objectives of becoming a share player in the laser diode GaN industry.
Tim McGowen: These lasers, of course, are still undergoing continuous testing. Can you tell us more about that please, Jim?
Jim Haden: So these lasers are still operating, so we’re beyond 500 hours now, and they have continued stable optical and electrical performance with less than 20% degradation. We refer to 20% because when you hit a 20% degradation, it’s usually considered end-of-life for the product. Even if it’s putting out 80% of the light that it once was, it’s considered end-of-life. So encouragingly we receive these results with older iterations of our products. As I said, we’re continuing to make improvements off of this baseline. So we expect with our current iterations, with some new epitaxial designs and enhanced processing through our Silicon Valley fab, that these improvements will result in improved yield, reliability and performance. And these refinements are what’s going to be needed to basically fix designs that our customers are happy with.
Tim McGowen: And finally, Jim, now that you have delivered feasible reliability of BluGlass’ lasers, what is next in your product development and commercial plans?
Jim Haden: Well, this is a exciting time for our business and our shareholders. This demonstration of feasibility and testing ongoing gives us the opportunity moving forward to talk to more customers, to engage. And we’ve got trade shows lined up for 2023. So we are continuing to test these products. We’re exercising our in-house capabilities as we implement these fixed designs and run them through our fabs. So in other words, we continue to bring our fab online and systematically bring in-house our supply chain, and we are seeing further improvements in our inline metrics. So we measure product as we go through the line. And those improvements are the types of improvements that encouraged us on the devices that we’re telling you now had good reliability.
So those types of improvements are why we expect to see even more improvements in performance and reliability. And so at this demonstration, we expect that moving forward with the new iterations in our pipeline, that we believe we will be better. And we are looking forward to presenting this type of information at the Photonics West Conference, which is a major photonics conference in San Francisco. We basically look forward to keeping you and the market updated on our progress in that venture.
Tim McGowen: Jim, thanks for your time, always good to hear from you.
Jim Haden: You as well, Tim. I really appreciate being here today.
