Illumination, Night Vision, and Industrial Heating

Infrared illumination sources are commonly used in machine vision, night vision, security, and surveillance systems. This chapter presents the optical properties of vertical‐cavity surface‐emitting lasers (VCSELs) in these application areas are compared to edge‐emitting lasers and light‐emitting diodes (LEDs), and a number of commercial applications. The first high‐volume commercial introduction of a VCSEL as an illuminator was in an optical mouse. One of the VCSEL aspects that enables rapid deployment of VCSELs to replace infrared LEDs in some applications is the ability to package the VCSELs identically to the existing LEDs. Like the VCSEL‐based illuminators, the principal advantage of VCSELs in heating applications is the ability to scale the optical power with the emission area. Illumination, night vision, and industrial heating applications take advantage of the ability to scale the optical power by simply scaling the number of emitters in 2D arrays and stacking these chips together in clever ways.