Directed-Energy & High-Energy-Laser Systems
High-energy-laser research runs on diode pumps. The large solid-state and fiber laser systems studied in laboratory and industrial settings are pumped by banks of diode-laser bars and arrays, and the optical power those pumps deliver is set by the current driving them. Scale a system up and the pump drive becomes one of its hardest engineering problems: hundreds of amps, delivered as long quasi-continuous-wave pulses, into arrays that carry enormous value and very little tolerance for a bad pulse. This is research and industrial work, the pump-drive and beam-combining test bench, not a fielded system.
This is the application the Directed Energy Division was founded around. DEI built its reputation on high-current pulsers for demanding laser programs, and that heritage now sits inside Berkeley Nucleonics. The drivers, the protection philosophy, and the timing discipline all trace back to driving large diode arrays at high average power, which is precisely what a high-energy-laser pump bench needs.
The challenge
Pumping a large laser at high average power concentrates several hard problems at once. The first is raw current. A bank of diode bars in series can demand hundreds of amps during the pump pulse, and the driver has to source that current with enough compliance voltage to overcome the combined forward drop of a long string. The second is average power. High-energy systems do not pump in brief shots, they pump in long QCW pulses repeated at a duty cycle that keeps the gain medium populated, so the driver has to hold a long, flat current pulse and dissipate the heat that comes with running near continuously.
Thermal and duty management therefore sit at the center of the design. Push the duty cycle up for more average optical power and the thermal load on both the driver and the array climbs, so the system has to be planned as a whole: current, pulse width, repetition rate, and cooling budgeted together rather than tuned in isolation. The third problem is timing. A beam-combining bench coordinates many pump channels, and if their drivers do not share a clean timing reference the combined output suffers. Stitching together pump drivers, triggers, and monitors from different vendors multiplies the points where that timing chain can break.
The BNC approach
DEI high-current drivers are built to hold long QCW pulses at high current with the compliance to drive deep diode strings. The output is a controlled current source through the full pulse, not just at its leading edge, so a long pump pulse stays flat from start to finish and the gain medium sees the energy the experiment planned. Over-current protection and safe-on-disable behavior guard the array through faults and through the power-up and power-down transitions where expensive arrays are most exposed.
Because Berkeley Nucleonics builds the drivers, the high-voltage and high-current supplies, and the timing instrumentation around them, a pump bench can stand on a single-vendor timing chain. One support path covers the pump drivers, their triggers, and their built-in voltage and current monitors, which removes the multi-vendor seams that tend to fail first when many channels have to fire together. For a beam-combining test bench that means the pump channels can be referenced to a common timebase and serviced as one system.
At the high-current end, the PCM-7700 drives up to 200 A for large arrays and long QCW pulses, and the PCO-6131 delivers up to 125 A as an OEM module with variable rise-time control for integration into a larger pump architecture. The compact PIM-Mini-200 brings up to 200 A in a small package where space is tight. For research programs that need still more current, the PCX-7500-EX is a preliminary 450 A driver; treat its figures as preliminary capabilities pending the published datasheet. All of these ratings are model capabilities to be confirmed against the current published BNC datasheet for your array and duty plan.
Recommended instruments
Size the driver to the array string and the duty cycle, then budget cooling against the average power the pump plan requires.
- PCM-7700: up to 200 A for large diode-array pump drive and long QCW pulses.
- PCO-6131: 125 A OEM module with variable rise-time control, for integration into a larger pump-drive architecture.
- PIM-Mini-200: up to 200 A in a compact form factor for space-constrained pump benches.
- PCX-7500-EX: preliminary 450 A driver for the highest-current research programs. Figures preliminary, pending published datasheet.
Getting started
Characterize the pump first: the series string voltage of the diode bank, the peak current the pump pulse needs, the QCW pulse width, and the repetition rate that produces your target average optical power. From those, size compliance and current, then budget the thermal load on both driver and array at that duty. Plan the timing chain across every pump channel from the start so the beam-combining bench shares one reference. Talk to a BNC applications engineer at info@berkeleynucleonics.com or 800-234-7858, and the DEI team will help match drivers to your pump architecture.