The use of solid-state lasers to replace traditional UV photon sources in medical device manufacturing

Traditional Excimer Laser UV photon sources are used in the manufacture of many medical devices including angioplasty balloons, catheters and other disposable devices made from plastics. These sources provide fairly stable, high energy radiation with reasonably short pulse lengths (about 20 ns) that are ideal for processing materials with high UV absorptions cleanly and economically. There are, however, several drawbacks to using excimer lasers in production including the capital and operating costs, the poor beam utilization efficiency of many hole drilling applications, the physical size and the relatively low pulse repetition rates (normally only a few hundred Hz). New diode pumped solid state lasers, incorporating efficient non-linear conversion to the ultraviolet, provide an attractive alternative to traditional sources and minimize some of the difficulties mentioned above. Compact systems with pulse-to-pulse energy variations of a few percent and repetition rates of several tens of kHz are now available which will both replace excimers in some application areas and open new application areas. This paper will discuss both the new laser sources and their direct application to the manufacture of medical devices.