Sharp GH04W10A2GC 350mW 405nm

DTR said:

Sent out quite a few so far with 700mA ACS1500SE's. So far have not had any reports of failures yet but it is still early. Hopefully that holds and if it does given time will bump up a bit and give it some time to generate any failure data.

I do sell to a pretty wide range of customers and the ones I get the best info from are the engraving and light show guys(although light shows have been a little less busy these days. This is not a unit that would be in much demand for that.

Good to know that some are seeing failures over 1A and yes the drivers used are important. As the nano which Lazeerer specifically designed to deal with the crazy random death issue that was happening at most any current with switching drivers out at the time. Linear drivers were not having the same issues which is how we knew it had to the the drivers but linear drivers just were not practical in handhelds due to common battery configurations, forward voltage and voltage drop in the regulator. As well as thermal management needs being increased.

He spent months trying to design it and had the advantage of knowing and getting some feedback/insight from some of the engineers he knew that work in the industry. Never really explained what the key was but if I remember without having to go back though my messages due to sensitivity of frequency or something that was a byproduct of the way switching drivers chop and recombine the incoming voltage/current(don't pretend to understand the specifics as not my wheelhouse). Anyway when delivered I went from seeing a 1/3 failure rate at just about any current over 200mA to a near zero rate when he delivered the new drivers up to 600mA. Now it may have been the saving grace to that diode but it may not be the nicest to play with this diode specially when pushing so far past the designed parameters.

I will update with any reports as I generate some reliability data. It would be good to see even if it just an estimate the amount of time being powered on not just how long since the unit was built specially if coming from an application like a handheld. With these seeing an hour or two on a unit of actual working time I would say is very rare. Keeping in mind these diodes are designed for applications that can rely on 500-30,000 hours of continuous use. I worry there gets to be some crossover confusion when say some are trying to figure out if a diode will be reliable in a more use heavy application.

I will say the more I use these the more they are growing on me. I was pretty resistant to them for years since they were not single mode and you do give up some power density but I now have to admit they have their appeal. I now really no longer think of these as comparable to the single mode near UV diodes. Other than similar in wavelength they are quite different. Anyway I actually feel kind of bad and sorry as due to my resistance to bribing these into the spotlight I might have somewhat deprived the community really experiencing them since I have had access to them for at least two years and only actually got one in my hands due to a mistake.

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