As the manufacturing industry transforms and upgrades towards high-end and intelligence, the laser equipment processing application market continues to expand. Moore, one of the founders of Moore's Law, predicted in 1965 that semiconductors would develop rapidly, and electronics would gain widespread popularity and penetrate into a wide range of application fields. Looking back half a century later, this prediction has been perfectly confirmed. Although fiber lasers have great market potential due to their advantages, semiconductor lasers are currently the most widely used on the market.

The development of semiconductor lasers began in the 1960s and has now been widely promoted and applied in all walks of life. With the advantages of compact structure, good beam quality, long life and stable performance, it has been widely used in communications, material processing and manufacturing, military, medical and other fields. Precisely because laser equipment has a wide range of applications and involves many industries, the market size of semiconductor lasers is very large. According to OFweek industry research data, the market size of semiconductor lasers in 2017 reached US$5.31 billion, with a year-on-year growth rate of 15%, accounting for 40% of the overall laser market share, and is an absolute dominant position.

With the continuous in-depth development of semiconductor technology, market demand continues to shift. The application fields of semiconductor lasers are also constantly changing. From the initial low-power equipment to the current high-power equipment, semiconductor lasers have also moved from some light processing fields to heavy processing fields.

As early as the 1980s, semiconductor lasers were only used in optical storage and some niche applications. At the time, optical storage was the semiconductor laser industry's first large-scale application. The continuous innovation of semiconductor laser technology has promoted the development of optical storage technologies such as digital versatile discs (DVD) and blue-ray discs (BD). By the 1990s, optical networks became the main battlefield for semiconductor lasers. Later in the 1990s, semiconductor lasers became key processing and manufacturing equipment for communication networks.

At present, the largest application of semiconductor lasers is as a pump source for fiber lasers and solid-state lasers. When a semiconductor laser is used as a fiber laser pump source, the structure of the pump system can be fundamentally simplified and the pump power level can be increased by increasing the unit power. As fiber lasers and solid-state lasers have increasingly higher requirements for output power, higher requirements are also placed on the power of semiconductor pump sources.

Due to the limitation of beam quality, traditional semiconductor lasers are difficult to be directly used for metal cutting. In recent years, with the improvement of semiconductor coupling technology and the gradual maturity of new beam combining technology, some fiber-output semiconductor lasers with a kilowatt or higher level can also meet the beam quality requirements for cutting. In addition, due to the diversity of semiconductor laser wavelengths, the wavelength of short-wavelength semiconductor lasers is very close to the wavelength absorption maximum of aluminum. Therefore, in the automotive industry, high-power semiconductor lasers are very suitable for welding aluminum automobile bodies. At present, semiconductor lasers with laser output powers between 2KW and 6KW have been widely used in the production process of the automobile industry.

In the field of direct material processing, the beam quality of semiconductor lasers is difficult to surpass that of fiber lasers. However, semiconductor lasers are very suitable for thin plate welding and cutting applications. The development of high-power semiconductor lasers has made many important applications possible. These lasers have replaced many traditional technologies and brought us many new products.

The first is high power. With the sharp increase in network data traffic, communication systems require higher power lasers to transmit optical signals and achieve faster data transmission speeds. At the same time, higher-power lasers are also needed in industrial manufacturing, laser processing and other fields to improve production efficiency and quality.

The third is multi-functionality. Modern application fields require more flexible laser equipment that can be switched in different situations. Therefore, the semiconductor laser industry will have more extensive applications in multimedia, environmental testing, life sciences and other fields.