Philips, Audi, Coherent laser technologies win German innovation awards

Winners of Germany's Innovation Award Laser Technology 2016 have been announced. Dr. Ir. Armand Pruijmboom and his team at Philips received first place in the open prize competition with the innovation "VCSEL arrays: A novel high-power laser technology for digital thermal processing." Pruijmboom, General Manager of Philips GmbH Photonics Aachen, accepted the award on 27 April in Aachen´s town hall.

The innovative work of the Philips team includes the development of the VCSEL array chips dedicated for high-power application, the packaging and thermal management of the VCSEL arrays including comprehensive finite-element modeling, system design by tailoring packages of various standard building blocks to specific industrial applications, and finally the application development itself.

Second place went to a team from Audi for "Laser Beam Remote Welding of Aluminium for Automotive Lightweight Design." A team from Coherent LaserSystems GmbH & Co. KG took third place for "UVblade -- Flexible Display Manufacturing by the Meter."

The Innovation Award Laser Technology is a European prize for applied research awarded biannually by the associations Arbeitskreis Lasertechnik e.V. and the European Laser Institute ELI. The award can be conferred on an individual researcher or on an entire project group, whose exceptional skills and dedicated work have led to an outstanding innovation in the field of laser technology.

The international jury of 10 members selected three outstanding finalists among the 15 applications for the award. The jury included SPIE Fellow Andreas Ostendorf and SPIE members Keiming Du and Wolfgang Knapp.