Picarro Demonstrates 25x Improvement in 488-nm Laser Lifetime
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Picarro, Inc. has announced the latest results of a reliability study covering their 488-nm Cyan lasers.
The results demonstrate a mean-time-to-failure, (MTTF) of 200,000 hours for a 25x improvement in reliability over argon ion lasers commonly used in instruments such as DNA sequencers, flow cytometers, microarray scanners and confocal microscopes.
The operating costs of these instruments can be substantially reduced by using these lasers.
These results were presented at the SPIE Great Lakes Photonics Symposium in Dayton, Ohio by Dr. Steven Wallace.
Many bio-instruments use air-cooled argon-ion lasers to induce fluorescence in marker dyes attached to biological cells, DNA strands or micro-spheres.
These lasers are notoriously unreliable, and users must frequently replace the lasers after 8,000 hours of operation or less.
Picarro’s reliability study is based on data from nearly 2 million installed device-hours and 200,000 device-hours from captive product tests.
A thorough analysis of this data was conducted using rigorous statistical methods adapted from the telecommunications industry.
With the level of reliability demonstrated in this study, Picarro lasers can save users thousands of dollars a year on laser replacement and expensive maintenance contracts, while providing a laser footprint and power consumption that is a small fraction of argon-ion lasers’.
