Blue laser breakthrough.

A manufacturing process that could slash the price of blue lasers almost a thousand-fold has been developed by Japanese electronics company Sharp Corp., as of February 2004. The new digital video discs will hold five times as much video data as today's discs. But the players that will be needed to read them will have to use blue laser diodes, which until now have cost around $1000 each because they can only be made in an expensive batch process. Red or infrared lasers are manufactured using a technique called molecular beam epitaxy in which ions of elements such as gallium and arsenic are fired in precise beams onto a semiconductor substrate in a very high vacuum to produce layers of metal arsenide. But blue lasers have to be made of metal nitrides, rather than arsenides.