We all know that laser diodes are photosensitive devices. If we encounter laser diodes that are broken, can we repair them ourselves? Let me give you an answer. In addition, many friends are asking how long is the life of QSI laser diodes? Let's discuss it together.

A lot of people ask this question, and I often meet customers running around with a burnt laser diode and asking, "Can this thing be repaired?" Is it good to change the chip? "

Actually, to tell the truth, once the laser diode is broken, it is basically impossible to repair it.

Why can't the laser diode be repaired by itself?

The structure of the laser diode is very precise. To put it bluntly, it is a micron-scale semiconductor device. The chip is packaged in a shell, which contains gold solder joints, electrodes, lenses, and even some with built-in PD monitoring tubes.

Once these structures are damaged, such as broken solder joints, cracked packages and burned chips, it is difficult to repair them manually, even if they can be seen with a microscope.

Even if you can solder it again, its optical alignment, power stability and wavelength drift will be completely out of order.

Many people think that the pins are burned, but in fact, the "active area" inside the chip is often burned through. That situation is equivalent to the burning of the heart, so how can it be saved?

How long is the life of QSI laser diode?

QSI is an old laser diode manufacturer in Korea, and its product life is actually quite good.

Generally speaking, under stable working conditions (such as constant current, appropriate temperature and good heat dissipation),

The life of QSI laser diode can reach more than 1000 hours, and some models can even reach 30 thousand hours.

We have a customer who works as a displacement sensor, using a low-power red light tube with QSI 650nm. It has been working continuously for more than three years, and the equipment has been on for more than ten hours every day. Up to now, the output power is quite stable. However, there are also customers whose power decays by half in half a year because there is no heating management in design. So life expectancy is not a "fixed value", but depends on how you use it.

Technical advice

If you have a broken laser diode in your hand, don't try to repair it yourself.

You can check the peripheral circuits, such as current limiting circuit, driver module and heat sink, first.

If these problems are not solved, even if a new tube is replaced, it will be burned again sooner or later.

In addition, if you are using QSI laser diode, it is suggested that:

Drive with constant power (don't use simple resistor to limit current)

Add thermal feedback or temperature control module.

When the equipment is running for a long time, measure the output power regularly to see if there is any attenuation trend.

These little tricks can make a laser diode live for several more years.

The broken laser diode can't be repaired basically. Instead of thinking about repairing it, it is better to protect it from the source.

Especially a high-quality product like QSI, as long as it is used properly, its life span is completely enough for you to use until the end of the project.