As long as the consumer has a sense of receiving more value for the computer dollar spent, consumers and corporations will continue to invest in upgrading their systems. Larger optical field sizes are required for the more complex logic and storage devices and also provide higher throughput from the lithography equipment. These require large area flat field illumination. This requires a controlled TEM00 beam and as deep UV as possible. In most cases this is an Argon ion laser.
Many applications use high-powered UV pulsed lasers for manufacturing operations.
Unfortunately, it is difficult to test these optical components with a pulsed laser system. The Innova 300 F RE D provides a lower power cw UV source that can, without damaging the optical components, test these components before they are exposed to high power pulses. F RE D's 248 nm output line matches the wavelength of the KrF output of excimer lasers, and the 264 nm line nearly matches that of the frequency-quadrupled output of a pulsed YAG laser.