 Did you key and a different present? I'm MPI is worth Electronic what do you do this week? What do they do? What do they make right this week? We're covering an MPI from worth electronic. We've covered their stuff before. This is their second time round I always love that and we get to cover different Products from electronic companies. So this week we're going to cover it. This is kind of new I didn't even know that worth made Opto electronics. This is a VIXL. What's a VIXL? It sounds like pixel, but it's not. This is a vertical cavity surface laser That's right. It's a laser You can have a laser on your circuit board quite easily You don't have to do a tubes or high voltage transformer. They're any of that nonsense. So what's a VIXL? So, you know, like I really call it a VIXL. That's apparently how it's pronounced It's a vertical cavity surface laser vertical. That's because it emits the laser out vertically through the top of the Device cavity cavity. It's not like a tooth thing. It's actually like how it generates the Coherent light surface, you know, it's on the surface of comes off the surface of the device and it's a laser This is a 3.5 millimeter by 3.5 millimeter VIXL and you can see here It's kind of taking a product out this from a presentation. There's a ceramic substrate on top of it is the the contacts the VIXL element Bonded onto the ceramic surface. There's a housing element and then there's like a diffuse silica glass on top and This has a 2 watt 940 nanometer Emission laser output except it's like, you know, normally don't think of lasers as made out of salt solid state But yeah, I mean if you look at time of flight sensors and stuff, they're using VIXLs as well So this is I got this from Wikipedia. This is kind of cool They show like how it's actually built and they have like little thin layers of that in the substrate and that's what they use to You know, basically create the cavity that emits the coherent light out of the top of the VIXL What I mean by coherent light What I mean is the light that comes out of it is really 940 nanometers and you can see this is the Distribution of light that comes out by intensity and you can see it's very very sharp and pointed It's really 940 and it's like not on the dot, right? It isn't like plus or minus 10 plus or minus 20. It doesn't have like a bell curve look to it It's a very fine point And not only that but all the wavelengths that come out are coming out at the same phase as well so compare that with Your favorite infrared emitter before this VIXL, which was you know, the infrared LED These come in surface-mount through hole, you know large scale you can get two watt higher emitters But if you compare the output you see like the wavelength This is a particularly low-cost IR emitter we use this for like a TV gone projects But you see on the left the wavelength It's 940, right? That's the middle, but it's like it kind of smears out to like 900 up to you know, almost a thousand nanometers So it's it's very wide band comparatively to the VIXL and on the right you can see the ambient temperature also affects the wavelength So it's it's like it's good enough for an IR remote and these things are a couple pennies a piece But if you need coherent light you need light that is you the exact wavelength in the exact phase all at the same time And IR LEDs is not going to cut it. So what are these used for? They're often used for time of flight or or basically light our devices So if you have an Apple phone the face ID system uses VIXL To light up your face and then you know I you read the patent But it like looks at the the response and it makes a map of your face if you looked at the Xbox connect It also used VIXL technology now in this chart of these the standard things distance speed of light time divided by To as ease with these stand for yeah, because it's actually measuring how long it takes for light to bounce off of The point and so we have time-of-flight sensors that we've covered before This is how it light our works it act literally bounces Light and it has to be coherent because it actually measures the fate You know, you can't have a jumble of light has to be coherent So when it comes back you can measure how long it took and the phase difference of that light And then you can do the map we're talking about like picoseconds here So you have to have a very good driver and that's one of the things that you light moves fast As fast as light so you do need to have a driver like you can't just like turn this on and like boom You've got data coming out of it You need to have that precise timing circuitry and there's other companies that sell The VIXL drivers you do Google for VIXL driver and you can check it out there There's various companies that sell them that will drive the VIXL That you've got here and then measure the light back But there could be other use cases for this is just the raw emitter There could be all sorts of uses for it. It is infrared. So of course, it's not visible to you know human eye So, you know worth, you know in their presentations are like, look, you know, yes, a LiDAR and time of flight biometric and 3d recognition robotics home automation stuff I mean like basically these things used to be crazy expensive and now they're like ten bucks And you can just pick and place them on so this is like pretty sweet If you have a use case where you need infrared light and you could greatly benefit by having it be coherent And by having it be very Precise wavelength a VIXL do the job much much much better than an IR LED Don't fight with an IR LED. It's not worth the time. This does the job much better There's two versions of this there's the A and B Just to be aware both of them have the basic the same specs But one has a viewing axis of 60 by 45 and the other is 110 by 85 so it's a little wider or narrower band range It's pretty neat. It's like cool that you can just buy a laser Semiconductor you do have to heat sink it I sawed it up one to some wires and you know, you can you can see the light come out of it I'll say that ironically it was I thought, you know, usually you can put an IR LED Under a camera and it'll show up But because this is so narrow band it actually doesn't leak into the visible range So it's like I could I could show it off. Yeah, it doesn't actually look as I thought like I'll be a really bright point of light But actually you don't really see it because it's doing a very good job of not, you know That makes sense leading into into you don't want to waste all those photons, right? Because usually again, you saw this usually there's a wider spread. So that said check it out This is the b1 again. There's also the the a version of the same sensor And you can just it the both part names are like really long So just search for worth BC SL and you'll you'll find them on digikey.com And you can purchase them and and they're just it's just a diode you sawed it on you power it with a constant current Power source because it is you know 1.5 volts to what 2 volts and it can draw up to an amp or more So you definitely need like a good power supply and a good heat sink But like this is a super cheap off-the-shelf way to get, you know, light our Quality sensors into your design could be cool. That's this week's iron MPI