Applications of Fiber Optic Delivery

The exciting and growing markets of biotechnology and semi-conductor manufacturing demand the very latest in state-of-the-art fiber optic laser technology.

In biotechnology, for example, there is a drive for effective new drug discovery using techniques such as confocal laser scanning microscopy to understand the biology of living cells, plus high throughput screening to enable millions of simultaneous experiments to be carried out to test the reaction of human cells to new drug compounds.

In clinical medicine there has been an explosion in demand for blood screening (haematology) using a technique called flow cytometry due to the worldwide epidemic of HIV/AIDS and other contagious viral diseases such as Hepatitis.

One astonishing finding that has failed to hit the headlines, is that the fourth biggest cause of death in the USA is reported to be adverse drug reaction (after heart disease, cancer and stroke). The ‘big hammer to crack a nut’ approach to conventional generalised drug therapy has clear limitations and a widely accepted answer to this problem is personalised medicine  - i.e. monitoring and matching drug therapy to the individual using their unique DNA code or genome. To make this practical it is necessary to drastically reduce the cost of determining the entire DNA code of an individual from the current cost of 10 million dollars to less than a thousand dollars using a technique called high throughput DNA sequencing.

Probably second to our desire for improved drug therapy, and the understanding and control of contagious diseases, is our desire for information.

We want our information to be up to date, immediate, downloadable in seconds and available on every electronic device we can imagine not just from our PC. Every mobile phone has more processing power than the average laptop of fifteen years ago and every laptop has more processing power that the average mainframe computer of fifteen years ago. And what’s more, electronic devices are now the ultimate consumable fashion accessory.

This insatiable desire for more, faster and accessible information is driving the semiconductor industry at a phenomenal rate in both volume output and technological advancement. The heart of an electronic device is the microprocessor which is manufactured using a process called photolithography. Photolithography is an extremely complex and technically challenging process that requires the production and control (via precision lasers) of layered structures to accuracies of a few tens of nanometers.