After buying and using many different Laser-Diode Controllers over the years, we decided to make our own – the available commercial offerings all seemed either too limited, or rather expensive, inflexible, and outdated. Even worse, some commercial laser drivers are not careful about brown-outs or shutdowns, and can fry your laser.

Clarify's patent-pending Smart Laser-Diode Drivers offer a powerful new degree of flexibility and performance. Each hardware function is modular, so you can mix and match high-power units for your specific LDs, with communications modules for all popular interface protocols, and an Arduino-based control module which ties it all together.

Combine Smart Laser-Drivers for multiple wavelengths for display and microscopy applications, with digital, PWM, and analog modulation and power control. Even color-tune and set white-points, fully automatically, with real-time color-sensor feedback. And our Smart LD Drivers work with our Smart TEC Controllers to temperature lock or tune your LD.

Modularity means you only buy and house the capabilities you need, yet can upgrade or reconfigure quickly and cost-effectively at any time. Start a system or experiment now, with confidence that you can scale up to higher powers, different interfaces, and a whole network of drivers as your needs grow and evolve. Design in our OEM versions, and inherit all the flexible configuration options of our family of drivers, sensors, and communications interfaces. Continuous monitoring ensures the safety of your valuable laser diodes, devices under test, experiments, or samples.

If you need something special, just ask… we love a new challenge.

Our Smart Laser Drivers emphasize safety, accuracy, speed, and user-feedback.

We provide precise analog power for the laser, with on/off modulation using quick FET switching from precise analog rails, rather than op-amps. This allows the highest PWM frequencies, when required. For example, even our minimal system goes up to 400 mA at over 1 MHz switching with optimum on/off times, all with high stability and very low noise. Or choose power modules up to 10 Amps at 10 Volts.

We provide instrumentation-amp current feedback, fusing, and power-off protection. Good RGB lasers can cost hundreds of dollars – one of our customers told us they had been using a cheap off-shore laser driver which had blown three expensive experimental lasers at power-off. This is inexcusable and avoidable! We have resettable polyfuses for low laser currents, and one-time fuses for high laser currents.

Our Smart Laser Driver has a button board and an LCD display for control and to update users, without requiring a PC. This display shows actual and set-point laser voltage and current in real-time. Or interface to the driver with any of our communication modules, and our open-source Visual Studio GUI.

We provide on/off inputs and outputs for external syncs and timing sources, so that, for example, RGB colors can be sync'ed with video. Or you can set duty cycles and PWM waveforms using internal registers in the control module.

We provide analog or digital power setting and monitoring, including an analog tracking output so you can conveniently check power levels and modulation on an oscilloscope.

In addition to the normal keyswitch and external interlocks, we provide outputs for laser-safety signage, and a red flashing light on the driver itself when the laser is operating: human intervention is required to disable this. Optionally, an enable can be required via WiFi (or any of our other protocols) from a convenient wall mounted switch each time the driver is turned on.

We support remote 10kΩ thermistor temperature sensing. And we power off lasers gently if a brown-out or power cord removal occurs.

Add our optional Color Sensor and Photodiode modules to characterize and control your system's optical power, color point, gamma curve, etc without having to tie up an expensive color meter or spectrophotometer.