High power laser sources are used in a large variety of applications for materials processing. The most common are welding, soldering, cutting, drilling, laser annealing, micro-machining, ablation and micro-lithography. Beside the right choice of the suitable laser source adequate high performance optics for the generation of the appropriate beam profile are essential. Widely used geometries are square, rectangular light fields or light lines with homogeneous intensity distributions. The whole devolution from optical design and engineering to products and applications is demonstrated. LIMO has developed powerful software tools founded on Maxwell's Equations taking into account all important physical aspects of the beam shaping task. Various beam shaping principles, e.g. phase shifting for single-mode lasers, beam mixing for multi-mode lasers and other beam transformation schemes are discussed. Based on LIMO's unique production technology with computer-aided design free-form micro-lens Surfaces can be structured cost-effectively on wafer-basis. Thus, the theoretically optimized surfaces can be. transformed with high precision into. a large range of materials. Typical products, their beam profiles and the respective application results are exemplarily shown for optical micro-lithography, micro-machining with Nd:YAG lasers and their harmonics as well as a-Si thin film annealing for flat panel display production.
