ADVANCED technology to enable a "quantum leap" in industrial laser printing speeds has been developed by a UK company.

Cambridge-based Skalene Technologies is creating a system using an array of high-powered fibre-optic lasers to print information on finished products, without interrupting the production line and allowing late-stage pack customisation.

It can produce high quality barcodes at speeds of more than three metres a second (3ms) - already a major breakthrough in printing technology - and is aiming to achieve 4ms.

Skalene's co-founder Julian White explained that the barcode is now ubiquitous for identifying products. For the detailed information they contain to be useable in retail it must be readable - if not, big retailers can impose heavy fines on suppliers.

"Existing technology is basically inkjet printing or scribing with a CO2 laser," he said. "The first can be fast, but has a tendency to smudge. The second works by burning off a layer of paint and, as a result, is relatively slow and only suitable for certain types of packaging."

Essentially transferred from the telecoms industry where high-powered lasers and fibre-optics have now been used for some 15 years, the new technology uses an array of small high-powered fibre-optics.

Fibres remove the need for bulky opto-mechanical systems and, when used with a diode laser, improve the quality of the beam. This allows the design of smaller, neater printers. With Skalene's technology, eight lasers can be packed into the volume of a paperback book.

White said that the cost of powerful laser diodes has come down 20 fold in 10 years, making the use of multiple diodes in arrays an economical option for printer designers. He predicted even cheaper laser diodes, possibly five-watt diodes at less than 100 dollars within five years.

Using a linear array is also much simpler than conventional systems that involve scanning the laser beam, because there is no need to translate the digital print layout into a vectored path for scanning passes.

Instead, control becomes a very basic interpretation of the bitmap image, he said. In its simplest form this involves turning individual lasers on or off in the necessary sequence, but Skalene's control system also allows the laser output to be precisely varied from minimum (just barely lasing) to 100 per cent power within five millionths of a second.

In printing by colour change pigment technology there is a typical requirement to vary power between about 500mW and 6.5W. "The result can be a finessed and high resolution image of the kind that is achieved by varying the drop size in inkjet printing," said White. "This would allow production of a sophisticated image such as a photograph on an ID pass or season ticket."

While the initial applications envisaged are date marking and barcode printing on products and their packaging, the system lends itself readily to other uses, for instance, to producing the type of individually barcoded customised phone cards that are hugely popular in many Asian countries.

It could also be used in lottery operations to barcode blank tickets, enabling them to be matched to their point of sale and hence to enable forgeries to be detected. This application, especially, needs the ability to print at speeds faster than the current generation of printing systems can achieve.

The Skalene system also has potential in non-printing applications such as high-speed welding of plastics, slitting/perforating and other processes involving precise application of heat.

As well as being cheaper to manufacture, the company believes that cost of ownership of printing equipment using its technology will be much less than that of traditional laser systems.

Laser lifetime is increased and there are no moving parts. Energy consumption is reduced by 80 per cent and the system does not require any consumables. Another big advantage is that the technology can be retrofitted into an existing production line.White and his colleagues are in discussions with a number of major printer manufacturers with a view to setting up a partnership to take their technology to market. They sold their last venture, Genapata, for four million dollars to a large North American instrumentation company.