China's laser industry has a strong geographical distribution. The Pearl River Delta region represented by Shenzhen mainly uses medium and small power laser processing equipment, while the Central China region represented by Wuhan Optical Valley is on the product line. More comprehensive, covering large, medium and small power equipment. In addition to these two largest industrial clusters, the Yangtze River Delta, Bohai Rim, and the emerging Northeast Industrial Zone have formed a relatively complete laser pointer industry belt.
With the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry to high-end and intelligent, the market for laser equipment processing and application has been expanding. Moore, one of the founders of Moore's Law, made a prediction in 1965 that semiconductors will be developed at a high speed, and the electronic society will be widely popularized and penetrated into a wide range of applications. Looking back from half a century, this prophecy has long been perfect. Although the fiber laser pointer has great market potential, it is still the most widely used semiconductor laser on the market.
A semiconductor laser is commonly referred to as a laser diode, and is called a semiconductor laser because it uses a semiconductor material as a property of a working substance. Semiconductor lasers usually use gallium arsenide, cadmium sulfide, indium phosphide, etc., and can be used as a pump source for fiber lasers and solid-state lasers, or can directly output laser light as a light source.
The development of semiconductor lasers began in the 1960s and has now been widely used in various industries. With its compact structure, good beam quality, long life and stable performance, it has made great achievements in the fields of communication, material processing and manufacturing, military and medical. It is precisely because of the wide application field of laser equipment and the numerous industries involved, the market for semiconductor lasers is very large. According to data from the OFweek industry research, the market size of semiconductor lasers in 2017 reached 5.31 billion US dollars, a year-on-year growth rate of 15%, accounting for 40% of the total market share of lasers, is absolutely dominant.
With the continuous development of semiconductor technology, market demand has been steadily turning. The field of semiconductor laser applications is also constantly changing. From the initial small power equipment to the current high-power equipment, semiconductor lasers have also shifted from some light processing fields to heavy processing fields.
As early as the 1980s, semiconductor lasers were only used in optical storage and in some niche applications. At the time, optical storage was the first large-scale application in the semiconductor laser industry. The continuous innovation of semiconductor laser technology has promoted the development of optical storage technologies such as digital versatile disc (DVD) and Blu-ray disc (BD). In the 1990s, optical networks became the main battlefield for semiconductor lasers. Later in the 1990s, semiconductor lasers became the key processing and manufacturing equipment for communication networks.
At present, the largest application of the semiconductor laser pointer is as a pump source for fiber lasers and solid-state lasers. When the 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 improved by increasing the unit power. As fiber lasers and solid-state lasers have higher and higher output power requirements, higher demands are placed on the power of semiconductor pump sources.