The violet diode is the most expensive component of any Blu-Ray or HD-DVD sled that we buy. I don't think people quite realize just how expensive these things are to make, they're a lot harder and MUCH more expensive to make than red or IR diodes, by a longshot. It's a whole different material system, and a whole different world from the materials standpoint, from the red and IR diodes.
It costs a few thousand dollars for a company like Nichia to make one single 2" wafer of diodes. How many diodes can you get out of a single 2" wafer? Not many, and we're literally talking thousands of dollars per wafer. Plus, the farther you get from 405nm into blue or green, you need to be switching to non-polar GaN. I'm purely just guessing, but I'm guessing these diodes aren't on non-polar GaN, but you need non-polar GaN for better performance, ESPECIALLY as get into blue and green and away from violet. Going from polar to non-polar GaN, you go from a 2" wafer to substrates that are not that much bigger than your thumbnail and cost even more money per diode.
$5 per diode? No way, not that cheap. It's really impossible to know exactly how much one costs from a certain manufacturer. They'll never reveal their yields (meaning working diodes per wafer) because of competition, they'll never reveal their actual supply costs (cost of substrate being one of the biggest) because their competitors are buying from the same places and everyone is competing on that, so we'll never actually know the real price of a diode. Oh, and in addition to the thousands of dollars per wafer of incremental costs during manufacturing, you're looking at millions of dollars of capital outlay before you can start manufacturing, so you have to start recouping those costs as well.
It's an amazing thing we get violet diodes as cheaply as we do. Someone, somewhere, is losing money on every single PHR that we buy, no question about it.
I dont know but I read this in a magine article a while a go and it seems like there would be a market for these diodes because if you combine these blue diodes with some red and green diodes supposedly you could make ultra small projectors. The projectors would be small enough to fit in a cell phone allowing you to watch movies on a "screen" many times bigger than the phone.
That's the goal, and it will be awesome, once green laser diodes actually exist. Once green diodes exist, and once green and blue get to the point that they're actually cost-effective to manufacture, laser TVs and laser projectors will happen very quickly. And it'll be awesome. But right now, no green lasers and the economics of it make it pretty much impossible.
